Washington Post names Brown deputy editor of rapid response I-team

The Washington Post announced Monday that Emma Brown will be deputy editor of the rapid-response investigations team.

While serving as interim deputy editor of the team this year, Brown shepherded a reconstruction of Ted Leonsis’s decision to move the Washington Wizards and the Capitals to Northern Virginia, resulting in a gripping, behind-the-scenes narrative account of months of secret negotiations among some of the most powerful figures in the D.C. area.

Brown joined the rapid-response team as a reporter in 2017. The following year, she was the first to report Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, who was then in the final days of what had been an uneventful confirmation process as a Supreme Court nominee. In 2021, Brown was a key player in “41 minutes of fear,” a video investigation that was in the package of stories about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that won the Pulitzer for Public Service.

In 2022, she was the lead reporter on stories revealing that Trump allies had accessed voting machines in Coffee County, Ga., an effort that later became central to the Fulton County indictment of the former president and his allies.

Last year, she and other members of the rapid-response team revealed that a judicial activist had arranged for payments to be made to the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – famously specifying in one communication that there be “no mention of Ginni” in the paperwork.