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| TWENTY-ONE |

Trade Secrets

he Theranos delegation that came to the Journal’s offices was
made up mostly of lawyers. Leading the pack was David Boies.
He was flanked by Mike Brille, Meredith Dearborn, and
Heather King, a former Boies Schiller partner and Hillary Clinton aide
who had become Theranos’s general counsel less than two months
earlier. Rounding out the group were Matthew Traub and Peter
Fritsch, a former Journal reporter who was the cofounder of an
opposition research firm in Washington, D.C. The lone Theranos
executive was Daniel Young.

Anticipating fireworks, I had brought along my editor, Mike
Siconolfi, who headed the investigations team, and Jay Conti, the
deputy general counsel of the Journal’s parent company who worked
closely with the newsroom on sensitive journalistic matters. I had kept
both apprised of my reporting and had let them in on the secret of who
my sources were.

We sat down in a conference room on the fifth floor of the Journal’s
newsroom. The tone was set from the start when King and Dearborn
pulled out little tape recorders and placed them at each end of the
conference table. The message was clear: they were approaching the
meeting as a deposition in a future legal proceeding.

At Traub’s request, I had sent a new set of eighty questions two
weeks earlier that were to form the basis for our discussion. King
opened the meeting by saying they were there to rebut the “false
premises” embedded in those questions. Then she lobbed the first