Michael Schmidt

In late August 2020, media reported on previews of Schmidt's book,"Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President", released by Penguin Random House on September 1. Schmidt was first interviewed about the book on The Rachel Maddow Show, discussing unanswered questions from the Mueller investigation about Trump/Russia connections.

Schmidt also broke several stories about doping in baseball. 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.

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 F.B.I. director James B. Comey had asked the Justice Department to publicly refute Trump's claims that President Obama had him wired tapped during the 2016 campaign.

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

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.

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. 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 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.

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.

Schmidt was born in a Jewish family in Nyack, New York, and went to high school at John Randolph Tucker High School in Richmond, Virginia, where he played baseball. He graduated from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 2005 with an AB in International Affairs after co-founding and editing Marooned with classmate Erin Koen.

Michael S. Schmidt (born September 1983) is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist, author, and correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, D.C. He is also the author of The New York Times bestseller "Donald Trump v. the United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President." The book rose to No. 3 on The Times bestseller list and No. 2 on both Amazon and the Wall Street Journal's best seller list.

Michael Schmidt was born in May 1966 in Salem, Massachusetts, USA.