David Fahrenthold

David Fahrenthold joined The New York Times’s Washington bureau as an investigative reporter in 2022.

Fahrenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting at The Post for his investigation the previous year into Donald Trump’s charitable giving, including the reality behind Trump’s repeated promises to donate his own money and his misuse of the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Fahrenthold’s reporting revealed that Trump had repeatedly used the foundation’s money to pay off debts for his private businesses, to make a $25,000 political donation and to buy large paintings of himself. The stories led to a lawsuit by the New York Attorney General, the closure of the foundation and a $2 million penalty for Trump.

Also in 2016, Fahrenthold broke the story of the “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump was captured bragging in vulgar terms about groping women.

Since 2017, Fahrenthold has covered the Trump Organization as a business, examining the conflicts of interest it posed for then-President Trump, and the way Trump used the presidency to benefit his own bottom line. He broke news about Trump’s use of the presidency to funnel taxpayer money to his properties, about companies and countries patronizing Trump businesses while lobbying the Trump administration, about the Trump Organization’s reliance on undocumented workers, and about the financial practices now under scrutiny by the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Attorney General.

Fahrenthold has spent the past 21 years at The Post, where he started as an intern on the night-cops shift and went on to serve as The Post’s correspondent in New England. He joined The Post’s political staff in 2010, when he began writing about presidential campaigns, Congress and the slowest and strangest parts of the federal bureaucracy, including an effort by the USDA to regulate magicians’ rabbits.

Fahrenthold is the recipient of a George Polk Award for political reporting, a Robin Toner Prize for political reporting, the Hillman Prize and numerous other honors. He’s a member of the advisory board of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and a pioneer in the use of social media as a tool for investigative reporting.