In 2019 he and two colleagues received the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a 2018 series of articles about the finances of Donald Trump.
He was part of the Times team that investigated and published Trump's 1995 state tax returns, after they were anonymously mailed to his colleague Susanne Craig in October 2016.
[7] The 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting was awarded to authors Buettner, Craig, and David Barstow "For an exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges".
[8] In September 2020 the Times team acquired more than two decades' worth of Trump's tax records, including the first two years of his presidency.
They described "struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.