Michael S. Schmidt (born September 23, 1983) is an American journalist, author, and correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, D.C.[1] He covers national security and federal law enforcement, and has broken several high-profile stories about politics, media and sports.

[3] 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.

[6] 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.

"[10] 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.

[14] Earlier in Schmidt's career, he was a sports reporter and broke several major stories about doping in baseball including that Sammy Sosa,[15] David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

[19] 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.

[22][23][24] In 2009, Schmidt broke the stories that David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez[25] and Sammy Sosa[26] were among the roughly 100 players who tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003.

[30] 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.

[31] 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.

[33] 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.