David E. Sanger (born July 5, 1960) is an American journalist who is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, writing since 1982, covering foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation, and the presidency.
He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, and has been awarded numerous honors for national security and foreign policy coverage.
Sanger is the son of Joan S. (assistant coordinator in the White Plains Public School District) and Kenneth E. Sanger (product manager for International Business Machines).[4][5] His paternal grandfather was Elliott Sanger, a co-founder of WQXR-FM, the radio station of The New York Times; and his paternal grandmother was Eleanor Naumburg Sanger (grandniece of banker Elkan Naumburg), who served as program director of WQXR.[6][4] He has one sister, Ellin Gail Sanger Agress.[7]
David E. Sanger at the Miller Center, May 11, 2011
David E. Sanger is chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times and one of the newspaper's senior writers. In a 38-year career at the paper, he has reported from New York, Tokyo, and Washington, specializing in foreign policy, national security, and the politics of globalization.
In 1982, after joining The New York Times, Sanger soon began specializing in the confluence of economic and foreign policy.[citation needed]
In 1986 Sanger played a major role in the team that investigated the causes of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The team revealed the design flaws and bureaucratic troubles that contributed to the disaster and won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.[citation needed]
Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, he wrote extensively about how issues of national wealth and competitiveness came to redefine the relationships between the United States and its major allies.[citation needed]
He was correspondent and then bureau chief in Tokyo for six years,[citation needed] traveling widely in Asia. He wrote some of the first pieces describing North Korea’s a nuclear weapons program, the rise and fall of Japan as one of the world's economic powerhouses, and China’s emerging role.
In 1994, he returned to Washington, as Chief Washington Economic Correspondent, and covered a series of global economic upheavals, from Mexico to the Asian economic crisis.[citation needed]
In March 1999, he was named a senior writer, and White House correspondent later that year.[citation needed]
In 2004, Armand Cucciniello? Sanger? was awarded, the Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting for his coverage of the Iraq and Korea crises.[citation needed] He also won the Aldo Beckman prize for coverage of the presidency.[citation needed]
In both 2003 and 2007, Sanger was awarded the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for coverage of national security strategy.[citation needed] He also shared the American Society of Newspaper Editors' top award for deadline writing in 2004, for team coverage of the Columbia disaster.[citation needed] In 2007, The New York Times received the DuPont Award from the Columbia Journalism School for Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?, a documentary featuring him and colleague William J. Broad, and their investigation into the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. Their revelations in the Times about the network became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.[citation needed]
In 2011, Sanger was part of another team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for International Reporting for their coverage of the Japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster.[8]
In 2012, Sanger broke the story that President Obama early in his presidency had secretly commissioned the Stuxnet cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear facilities;[9][10] his reporting was depicted in the documentary filmZero Days (2016).[10][11]
In October 2006, he was named Chief Washington Correspondent.[citation needed]
In a March 2016 interview,[12] Sanger questioned Donald J. Trump, who was running for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, about his views on foreign policy. Sanger pressed Trump on the idea that his worldview was one of 'America First', a term first used in association with Trump in a report by the former U.S. diplomat Armand V. Cucciniello III in USA Today.[13] Trump "agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might be summed up as 'America First'." His campaign quickly adopted the slogan as the cornerstone of Trump's foreign policy. The phrase was used throughout the Trump administration.
In April 1987, Sherill Ann Leonard, a third-year student at the Yale Law School, was engaged to Sanger.[16]
In June 1987, both 1982 magna cum laude graduates of Harvard College, Sanger married Leonard, now a Yale Law School graduate, and a law clerk, for Judge Robert L. Carter, in a non-denominational ceremony in the Memorial Church of Harvard University.[4]
In 2009, Sanger's first book is The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power , based on his seven years as the TimesWhite House correspondent, covering two wars, the confrontations with Iran, North Korea and other states that are described in Western media as "rogue" states, and America's efforts to deal with the rise of China.
In 2012, Sanger's second book Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power is an account of how Obama has dealt with those challenges, relying on innovative weapons (such as UAVs and cyberwarfare, such as Operation Olympic Games) and reconfigured tools of American power.
"David Sanger included the classified information Cartwright communicated to him in an article..."[17]
In 2016, General James Cartwright, then the retired Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pleaded guilty to making false statements in connection with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information about the military use of the Stuxnet computer worm on the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility,[18][19] some of which appeared in Sanger's 2012 book Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.[20][21][22]
James Edward "Hoss" Cartwright is a retired United States Marine Corps general who last served as the eighth vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from August 31, 2007, to August 3, 2011. He previously served as the Commander, U.S. Strategic Command, from September 1, 2004, to August 10, 2007, and as Acting Commander, U.S. Strategic Command from July 9, 2004, to September 1, 2004. He retired from the Marine Corps on August 3, 2011, after nearly 40 years of service.
Fred M. Kaplan is an American author and journalist. His weekly "War Stories" column for Slate magazine covers international relations and U.S. foreign policy.
Bret Louis Stephens is an American conservative journalist, editor, and columnist. He has been an opinion columnist for The New York Times and a senior contributor to NBC News since 2017. Since 2021, he has been the inaugural editor-in-chief of SAPIR: A Journal of Jewish Conversations.
Jeffrey Mark Goldberg is an American journalist and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. During his nine years at The Atlantic prior to becoming editor, Goldberg became known for his coverage of foreign affairs. Goldberg became moderator of the PBS program Washington Week in August 2023, while continuing as The Atlantic's editor.
William J. Broad is an American science journalist, author and a Senior Writer at The New York Times.
Oghab 2 is an Iranian counter-espionage agency tasked to protect Iran's nuclear facilities from threats, including sabotage and cyber warfare. According to The New York Times, Iran has acknowledged that it is fighting nuclear espionage, and has foiled attempts to recruit spies and defectors to pass secrets out of their enrichment facilities. The New York Times also states this may be due to efforts rumoured to have started under the George W. Bush administration in the United States to sabotage parts imported into Iran. It is claimed these efforts were accelerated under President Barack Obama's administration, with the facilities facing trouble with poor designs and difficulty obtaining parts, due to sanctions imposed by the United Nations.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of Iran, from the Mosaddegh coup of 1953 to the present day. The CIA is said to have collaborated with the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Its personnel may have been involved in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s. More recently in 2007-8 CIA operatives were claimed to be supporting the Sunni terrorist group Jundallah against Iran, but these claims were refuted by a later investigation.
Thomas Edward Donilon is an American lawyer, business executive, and former government official who served as the 22nd National Security Advisor in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2013. Donilon also worked in the Carter and Clinton administrations, including as chief of staff of the U.S. State Department. He is now Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the firm's global think tank.
Jackson Diehl is a newspaper editor and reporter. He was the deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post from February 2001 to August 2021. He was part of the Washington Post team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. He wrote many of the paper's editorials on foreign affairs, helped to oversee the editorial and op-ed pages and authored a regular column. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and can speak Spanish and Polish.
Mark Mazzetti is an American journalist who works for the New York Times. He is currently a Washington Investigative Correspondent for the Times.
Stuxnet is a malicious computer worm first uncovered in 2010 and thought to have been in development since at least 2005. Stuxnet targets supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and is believed to be responsible for causing substantial damage to the nuclear program of Iran. Although neither country has openly admitted responsibility, multiple independent news organizations recognize Stuxnet to be a cyberweapon built jointly by the United States and Israel in a collaborative effort known as Operation Olympic Games. The program, started during the Bush administration, was rapidly expanded within the first months of Barack Obama's presidency.
Operation Olympic Games was an ostensible and still unacknowledged campaign of sabotage by means of cyber disruption, directed at Iranian nuclear facilities likely by the United States and Israel. As reported, it is one of the first known uses of offensive cyber weapons. Started under the administration of George W. Bush in 2006, Olympic Games was accelerated under President Obama, who heeded Bush's advice to continue cyber attacks on the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. Bush believed that the strategy was the only way to prevent an Israeli conventional strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan is an American attorney who currently serves as the United States National Security Advisor, reporting directly to President Joe Biden. He previously served as Director of Policy to President Barack Obama, National Security Advisor to then Vice President Biden and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary Hillary Clinton at the U.S. Department of State. Sullivan also served as senior advisor to the U.S. federal government at the Iran nuclear negotiations and senior policy advisor to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, as well as visiting professor at Yale Law School.
Matt Apuzzo is an American journalist working for The New York Times.
Maggie Lindsy Haberman is an American journalist, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and a political analyst for CNN. She previously worked as a political reporter for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and Politico. She wrote about Donald Trump for those publications and rose to prominence covering his campaign, presidency, and post-presidency for the Times. In 2022, she published the best-selling book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.
America First refers to a populist political theory in the United States that emphasizes the fundamental notion of "putting America first", which generally involves disregarding global affairs and focusing solely on domestic policy in the United States. This generally denotes policies of isolationism, American nationalism, and protectionist trade policy.
Armand V. Cucciniello III is a former American diplomat, news reporter, military advisor, political commentator, and public relations executive. Cucciniello was formerly spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Iraq.
Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power is a 2012 book by David E. Sanger. It discusses the foreign policy of the Obama administration, with an emphasis on the president's use of covert operations, drone strikes, and cyberwarfare. In 2016, the former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright pleaded guilty to making false statements to federal investigators regarding his alleged disclosure of classified information to Sanger about the military use of the Stuxnet computer worm on the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, an operation detailed in the book.
Michael D. Shear is an American journalist who is a White House correspondent for The New York Times. He previously worked at The Washington Post, where he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. He regularly appears on CNN and MSNBC.
Erik van Sabben was a Dutch engineer recruited in 2005 by the Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD to infect the centrifuge infrastructure at the Natanz nuclear enrichment lab in Iran with the Stuxnet malware in 2007. Although he completed the covert mission successfully and left Iran without incident, he later died in an apparent single-vehicle motorcycle accident in Dubai. He was survived by his wife and children.
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