Hugo Lowell (born March 30, 1999) is a political investigations reporter for The Guardian in Washington, D.C. He covers former President Donald Trump and the US Department of Justice, and has broken several high-profile stories.
He frequently appears on MSNBC as a political analyst.
Since Trump left office, he has broken major stories on the federal and congressional investigations into Trump, including about Trump’s retention of classified documents and the House January 6 select committee.
In 2022, he won the National Press Club’s political journalism award for a story on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Lowell was born in New York City.
He was educated at the Dalton School, a private co-educational day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and St. Paul's School, London.
Lowell has been the Guardian’s lead reporter on the federal and congressional investigations into Trump after his presidency since he joined its Washington bureau in 2021.
He started his career reporting on the Russian doping scandal and the International Olympic Committee for the i newspaper while in high school.
Lowell regularly appears on MSNBC, including as a guest on Morning Joe, The Beat with Ari Melber, and The ReidOut. He has also appeared on the PBS NewsHour, PBS Washington Week, CBS News, ABC News Australia 7.30 Report, BBC World News, BBC World Service radio and Sirius XM radio.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes has described Lowell’s reporting as "groundbreaking" and Mehdi Hasan has called him a "scoop machine".
His reporting has been cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and Bloomberg.
In November 2021, Lowell broke the story that Trump had called political operatives based at a “war room” in the Willard hotel and asked them about ways to obstruct the certification President Joe Biden’s election win the night before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
The Trump war room scoop led to the House January 6 committee to open a new line of inquiry, issue a subpoena to a senior Trump adviser and won the 2022 National Press Club's Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism.
Lowell also broke numerous other stories on the January 6 investigation, including the fact that Trump made a call from the White House during the Capitol attack to Republican Senator Mike Lee that was not recorded on the official phone logs, and the US Secret Service turned over only one text message to investigators after the agency was subpoenaed for its communications around the Capitol attack.
In June 2023, during the criminal investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property, Lowell reported on the contents of confidential notes dictated by Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran that were subpoenaed and later used by the Special Counsel Jack Smith to indict Trump for obstruction of justice.
In July 2023, the day before Trump was indicted in the documents case, Lowell also broke the news that Trump had been informed weeks beforehand that he had formally been designated a target in the criminal investigation, an indication from prosecutors that he was likely to be charged.
