David Corn

Corn announced on The Rachel Maddow Show on September 12, 2017 that he and Michael Isikoff were working on a new book about the Donald Trump campaign and administration's ties with Russia and the Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential campaign, as well as a history of Russian tactics. Their book was released on March 13, 2018 and entitled Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.

On November 1, 2017, Politico reported that David Corn's employer, Mother Jones magazine, had opened an investigation into allegations that Corn had engaged in inappropriate workplace behavior.

David Corn of Mother Jones will receive the George Polk Award for Political Reporting for a story that rocked the nation and perhaps cost Mitt Romney the Presidential election. Through persistent digging and careful negotiation with a source, Corn secured a full recording of Romney at a $50,000-a-plate Florida fundraiser declaring that 47 percent of Americans — those who back President Obama — are “victims” who are “dependent upon government” and “pay no income tax.” Corn worked for weeks to obtain the recording, but it was his years of high-impact journalism that helped lead him to the source of the recording. Furthermore, it was Corn’s extensive previous reporting on Romney that convinced the source to trust him with its release.

In February 2013, he was named winner of the 2012 George Polk Award in journalism in the political reporting category for his video and reporting of the "47 percent story," Republican nominee Mitt Romney's videoed meeting with donors during the 2012 presidential campaign.

In announcing Corn's being awarded the George Polk Award for 2012, the sponsors wrote:

David Corn's story that introduced the secret tape was published in Mother Jones on September 17, 2012.

However, in early 2007, an unclassified summary of Valerie Plame's employment history at the CIA was disclosed for the first time in a court filing and confirms that Plame was indeed a covert operative at the time her name was made public by Novak.

With the arrival of George W. Bush, Corn became a harsh critic of the President. His next book, The Lies of George W. Bush, charged that Bush had systematically "mugged the truth" as a political strategy, and he found fault with the media for failing to report this effectively. The book also broke with journalistic practice for its explicit charge of lying, a word usually avoided as editorializing. In particular, Corn criticized many of the arguments offered to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq; and he challenged New York Times columnist William Safire for claiming links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. In Hubris, written with Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Corn analyzed the Bush administration's drive toward the invasion.

Corn was personally involved in the early coverage of the controversy over leaks to the media of the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame. After Robert Novak revealed Plame's identity in his July 14, 2003, column, Corn was the first to report, three days later, that Plame had been working covertly; and he raised the possibility that the leak of her identity violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Corn moved on to fiction with a contribution to Unusual Suspects (1996), a paperback collection of crime stories published as a fundraiser to combat world hunger. His first novel, Deep Background, is a conspiracy thriller about the assassination of a president at a White House press conference and the ensuing investigation. Reviews praised Corn's mastery of the political atmosphere and characters, although they split on whether this was a virtue or, coming at the conclusion of Bill Clinton's term in office, already all-too-familiar territory.

Corn's first book was a 1994 biography of longtime Central Intelligence Agency official Ted Shackley, which received mixed reviews. The book used Shackley's climb through the CIA bureaucracy to illustrate how the Agency worked and to follow some of its Cold War-era covert operations. In The Washington Post, Roger Warner called it "an impressive feat of research"; but, in The New York Times, Joseph Finder claimed Corn was seriously distorting history to blame Shackley for a series of CIA failings.

Corn was raised in a Jewish family in White Plains, New York. He graduated from White Plains High School in 1977. He attended Brown University, where he majored in history and worked for The Brown Daily Herald. After his junior year, he interned at The Nation where he accepted a job as editorial assistant instead of returning to finish his degree. He earned his remaining credits at Columbia University and received a B.A. from Brown University in 1982. He joined Mother Jones in 2007.

David Corn (born February 20, 1959) is an American political journalist, author, and the chief of the Washington bureau for Mother Jones. He has been Washington editor for The Nation and appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BloggingHeads.tv opposite various other media personalities.