Michael S. Schmidt (born September 1983) is a two time Pulitzer prize winning American journalist, author, and correspondent for ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' in
Washington, D.C.
)
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He covers
national security and federal
law enforcement
Law enforcement is the activity of some members of government who act in an organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating, or punishing people who violate the rules
Rule or ruling may refer to:
Education ...
, has broken several high-profile stories. He is also a national security contributor for
MSNBC
MSNBC (originally the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company) is an American news-based pay television cable channel. It is owned by NBCUniversala subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered in New York City, it provides news coverage and politi ...
and
NBC News
NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's var ...
.
Among the major stories he has broken was the existence of
Hillary Clinton private email server. During the Trump presidency, he broke several major stories, including about the Mueller investigation, other investigations of Trump and Trump's efforts to overturn the election.
In 2018, he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work the previous year. He won one of the Pulitzer Prizes for breaking the news that President Trump had asked the FBI director
James Comey
James Brien Comey Jr. (; born December 14, 1960) is an American lawyer who was the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2013 until his dismissal in May 2017. Comey was a registered Republican for most of his adul ...
for a loyalty pledge, and to close the
federal investigation into
Michael Flynn. That story led the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel Robert S. Mueller III 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
A sexual predator is a person seen as obtaining or trying to obtain sexual contact with another person in a metaphorically "predatory" or abusive manner. Analogous to how a predator hunts down its prey, so the sexual predator is thought to "hunt" ...
allegations against film producer
Harvey Weinstein
Harvey Weinstein (; born March 19, 1952) is an American former film producer and convicted sex offender. He and his brother, Bob Weinstein, co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films includ ...
that led to the rise of the
Me Too movement
#MeToo is a social movement against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and rape culture, in which people publicize their experiences of sexual abuse or sexual harassment. The phrase "Me Too" was initially used in this context on social media in ...
.
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
Doping in baseball has been an ongoing issue for Major League Baseball (MLB). After repeated use by some of the most successful professional baseball players in MLB history, these banned substances found their way to the collegiate level. At the ...
including that Sammy Sosa, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.
Early life and education
Schmidt was born to a
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
family in
Nyack, New York
Nyack () is a village located primarily in the town of Orangetown in Rockland County, New York, United States. Incorporated in 1872, it retains a very small western section in Clarkstown. It is a suburb of New York City lying approximately no ...
. 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
John Randolph Tucker High School is a public high school in the West End of Henrico County, Virginia, United States. It is named after lawyer and judge John Randolph Tucker. Its students and faculty often refer to themselves as “Tigers," and lo ...
in
Richmond, Virginia, where he played baseball.
He graduated from
Lafayette College
Lafayette College is a private liberal arts college in Easton, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1826 by James Madison Porter and other citizens in Easton, the college first held classes in 1832. The founders voted to name the college after General Laf ...
in
Easton, Pennsylvania
Easton is a city in, and the county seat of, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, United States. The city's population was 28,127 as of the 2020 census. Easton is located at the confluence of the Lehigh River, a river that joins the Delaware R ...
, in 2005 with an AB in
international affairs
International relations (IR), sometimes referred to as international studies and international affairs, is the scientific study of interactions between sovereign states. In a broader sense, it concerns all activities between states—such a ...
after co-founding and editing ''Marooned'' with classmate Erin Koen.
Career
In 2004, Schmidt worked at ''
The Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
''.
Schmidt began working for ''The Times'' as a news clerk in 2005. In December 2007, he was made a staff reporter, covering
performance-enhancing drugs
Performance-enhancing substances, also known as performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), are substances that are used to improve any form of activity performance in humans. A well-known example of cheating in sports involves doping in sport, where bann ...
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 documents were testimony from Marines about the 2005
Haditha Massacre
The Haditha massacre (also called the Haditha killings or the Haditha incident) was a series of killings on November 19, 2005, in which a group of United States Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. The killings occurred in Haditha, a cit ...
. In that incident, the Marines had killed 26 Iraqi civilians. An Iraqi junkyard attendant had used other classified American documents to cook smoked carp. 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
Matt Apuzzo (born October 20, 1978) is an American journalist.
Early life
Apuzzo was born in Cumberland, Maine and attended Colby College, where he edited the school newspaper, the Colby Echo.
Career
He wrote for the Waterville ''Morning S ...
(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.
On March 5, 2017, Schmidt broke the story that the FBI director
James Comey
James Brien Comey Jr. (; born December 14, 1960) is an American lawyer who was the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2013 until his dismissal in May 2017. Comey was a registered Republican for most of his adul ...
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 wide spread concerns in the intelligence community about Kushner having access to the country's most closely guarded secrets.
Clinton email story
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
During her tenure as United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton drew controversy by using a private email server for official public communications rather than using official State Department email accounts maintained on federal servers ...
. Defenders of Hillary Clinton have said that Schmidt's coverage of her was not fair and he has been frequently criticized by the group Media Matters and other liberals. After breaking the Clinton email story, Media Matters's founder and chairman, David Brock, wrote an open letter to The New York Times about the story, asking for a "prominent correction as soon as possible". The Times did not run a correction. The inspector general for the State Department said in May 2016 that Clinton's use of the account had violated State Department's record keeping policies.
Comey–Trump story
On May 16, 2017, Schmidt broke the story that
James Comey
James Brien Comey Jr. (; born December 14, 1960) is an American lawyer who was the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 2013 until his dismissal in May 2017. Comey was a registered Republican for most of his adul ...
, the former FBI director in the Trump Administration, had written an FBI memo detailing President
Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021.
Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of P ...
's alleged ordering of Comey to end the FBI's investigation of
Michael Flynn prior to the conclusion of the investigation's findings. The story led the Justice Department to appoint the former FBI director
Robert Mueller to investigate Trump, which eventually produced the
Mueller report.
Personal life
In April 2022, he married American television host
Nicolle Wallace
Nicolle Wallace (née Devenish; born February 4, 1972) is an American television host and author. She is known for her work as the anchor of the MSNBC news and politics program '' Deadline: White House'' and a former co-host of the ABC daytime ...
.
References
External links
News articles by Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schmidt, Michael S.
1983 births
Living people
Jewish American journalists
American male journalists
Journalists from Virginia
Journalists from Washington, D.C.
Lafayette College alumni
People from Rockland County, New York
Writers from Richmond, Virginia
Sportswriters from New York (state)
The Boston Globe people
The New York Times writers
NBC News people
MSNBC people
Gerald Loeb Award winners for Investigative
Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting winners
Pulitzer Prize for Public Service winners
Livingston Award winners for National Reporting