Michael Schmidt

Michael S. Schmidt (born September 1983) is an American journalist, author, and correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, D.C. He covers national security and federal law enforcement, and has broken several high-profile stories.

He is also a national security contributor for MSNBC and NBC News.

Among the major stories he has broken was the existence of a private email server used by Hillary Clinton.

During the Trump presidency he broke several major stories including details of the Mueller investigation, investigations of Trump and Trump's efforts to overturn the election.

In 2004, Schmidt worked at The Boston Globe.

He graduated from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania in 2005 with an AB in international affairs also co-founding and editing Marooned with classmate Erin Koen.

Schmidt began working for The Times as a news clerk in 2005.

The documents were testimony from Marines about the 2005 Haditha Massacre.

In that incident, the Marines had killed 26 Iraqi civilians.

An Iraqi junkyard attendant had used other classified American documents to cook smoked carp.

In December 2007, he was made a staff reporter, covering performance-enhancing drugs and legal issues in sports.

In 2009, Schmidt broke the stories that David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and Sammy Sosa were among the roughly 100 players who tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003.

In 2010, Schmidt broke the story about how the firm of baseball super agent Scott Boras had provided tens of thousands of dollars in loans to a young prospect, raising questions about whether Boras' firm had broken rules designed to prevent players from being exploited.

Schmidt was a correspondent for The Times in Iraq in 2011.

During his time in Iraq, he uncovered a series of classified documents in a junkyard in Baghdad.

The story, which ran as American troops were leaving Iraq in 2011, was widely praised.

In May 2015, Schmidt was part of a group of Times reporters who broke a series of stories about the Justice Department charging FIFA executives.

Schmidt was in the lobby of a hotel in Switzerland when law enforcement officers arrested the executives.

In December 2015, a New York Times story by Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo (written together with Julia Preston) criticized the US government for missing crucial evidence during the visa vetting process for Tashfeen Malik, who would later become one of the shooters in the 2015 San Bernardino attack.

The director of the FBI dismissed the reporting as "garble" and it turned out that rather than having "talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad" as stated in the article, she had mentioned these in private communications.

The New York Times' public editor called for "systemic changes" after these articles by Schmidt and his coauthors (both of which had relied on anonymous government sources).

Schmidt has been one of the Times' lead reporters on the federal and Congressional investigations into connections between Donald Trump's associates and the Russians.

In March 2015, Schmidt broke the story that Hillary Clinton had exclusively used a personal email account when she was secretary of state.

The story said that Clinton "may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency's record."

In response to the story, Mrs. Clinton announced that she would release all of her work related emails from her time in office.

After breaking the story, he was the lead reporter covering the Hillary Clinton email controversy.

On March 5, 2017, Schmidt broke the story that the FBI director James Comey had asked the Justice Department to publicly refute Trump's claims that President Obama had him wire-tapped during the 2016 campaign.

Schmidt also broke several other stories about the Trump presidency, including that Trump ordered his chief of staff, John Kelly, to give his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a security clearance despite widespread concerns in the intelligence community about Kushner having access to the country's most closely guarded secrets.

In 2018 Schmidt won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work of the previous year.

One of the Pulitzer Prizes was awarded for breaking the news that President Trump had asked the FBI director James Comey for a loyalty pledge and to close the federal investigation into Michael Flynn.

That story led the Justice Department to appoint Robert S. Mueller III as a special counsel to investigate President Trump.

With another reporter at the Times, Schmidt won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about sexual harassment allegations against Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly that led to Fox firing O'Reilly.

He shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the 2018 Gerald Loeb Award for Investigative business journalism for stories on the sexual predator allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein that led to the rise of the Me Too movement.

In September 2020, Schmidt's first book, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, was released by Penguin Random House.

The book received positive reviews and rose to number three on The New York Times Best Seller list and number two on both Amazon and number two on the Wall Street Journal 's best-seller list.

Earlier in Schmidt's career he was a sports reporter and broke several major stories about doping in baseball including that Sammy Sosa, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

Schmidt was born to a Jewish family in Nyack, New York.

His parents are Rachel and James Schmidt.

James Schmidt is a well known wealth manager.

Michael Schmidt went to high school at John Randolph Tucker High School in Richmond, Virginia, where he played baseball.