While still in graduate school, Isikoff found work with the
Alton Telegraph at a salary of $100 per week. In 1978 he was on staff with the Washington, D.C.–based
States News Service, where he focused on Illinois-based stories. Isikoff was a part of the
Newsweek team that won the
Overseas Press Club's most prestigious award, the 2001 Ed Cunningham Memorial Award for best magazine reporting from abroad for
Newsweeks coverage of the war on terror. Isikoff has also been a contributing
blogger at
HuffPost, and has appeared on the
Democracy Now! show. In the May 9, 2005, issue of
Newsweek, Isikoff co-wrote an article that stated that interrogators at
Guantanamo Bay "in an attempt to rattle suspects, flushed a
Quran down a toilet." Detainees had earlier made similar complaints, but this was the first time a government source had appeared to confirm the story. The article caused widespread rioting and massive anti-American protests throughout some parts of the
Islamic world, resulting at least 17 deaths in
Afghanistan. The magazine later retracted the story after noting that the anonymous official who was their source subsequently could not remember important details. A subsequent June 4, 2005, report by the Pentagon, however, confirmed multiple instances of
desecration of the Quran at Guantanamo, including one incident in which a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran. Isikoff's online column with fellow journalist
Mark Hosenball, "Terror Watch," won the 2005 award from the
Society of Professional Journalists for best investigative reporting online. Isikoff is the co-author, with journalist
David Corn, of
Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, a 2006 book about the selling of the
2003 invasion of Iraq to the U.S. public and the ensuing
Plame affair. The book was a
New York Times best-seller. A September 23, 2016,
Yahoo News article written by Isikoff was cited by federal authorities in a
FISA warrant application in order to justify the surveillance of
Carter Page, who was alleged to have a connection to Russian authorities during the
2016 presidential campaign. This article is also cited in the
Nunes memo. Nunes claimed that Isikoff's article was wrongly used by the FBI as independent corroboration for the Steele Dossier, when in fact the dossier's author was the article's source. The
Inspector General later confirmed that the FISA application "incorrectly assess[ed] that Steele did not directly provide information to Yahoo News." Isikoff was a creator of the 2017 short film
64 Hours In October: How One Weekend Blew Up The Rules Of American Politics regarding events around October 7–9, 2016 relating to alleged
Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. In 2018, Isikoff claimed that
Linda Tripp offered to take the infamous blue dress (claimed to have been marked with Bill Clinton's semen as a result of a sexual encounter with Monica Lewinsky) from Lewinsky's closet and hand it over to him. Isikoff allegedly refused, saying he didn't want to take possession of stolen property and did not have access to President Bill Clinton's DNA to test the evidence on the dress anyway. In a 2021 investigative report for
Yahoo! News with colleagues, Isikoff uncovered a CIA plot to kidnap
Julian Assange from the
Ecuadorian embassy in London, though the plan was reportedly never approved. In 2024, Isikoff's new book with co-author Daniel Klaidman was released. Titled
Find Me the Votes, it centered on the efforts to challenge the
2020 United States presidential election results in the state of Georgia. == Personal life ==