WSJ hires Bender from Bloomberg for DC bureau

Friends,

I’m very excited to announce that Mike Bender is joining us to help cover national politics and the presidential campaign.

As you know, Patrick O’Connor is leaving us, and he will be sorely missed, and in many ways irreplaceable. We’re grateful to him for all his contributions, and will do a more suitable send-off soon.

But we are lucky to have Mike stepping in; he brings a great background and the high praise of all his colleagues.

Mike has spent more than 15 years of covering politics in Washington and at newspapers in three of the nation’s most important presidential battleground states.

Most recently he was at Bloomberg, where he opened a Florida state capital bureau for the company in 2012, covered Capitol Hill and the White House, and spent the past two years on the presidential campaign trail. Covering Jeb Bush’s erstwhile campaign, Bender was the first to report the two major stories that served as bookends to that candidacy: When Bush’s team set an audacious fundraising goal of $100 million, and later when hey were forced to make drastic budget cuts. His autopsy on the Bush campaign ranks among the finest pieces of the cycle. More recently he’s distinguished himself in the crowded pack of political journalists by breaking news about a wildly chaotic private conference call between Donald Trump and his surrogates, and was the first report about the Republican nominee’s plans to dial back his fundraising goals.

Prior to Bloomberg, Mike spent eight years at Florida newspapers, including the Tampa Bay Times, where he was the primary reporter covering the governor’s office. He also covered state government and politics for newspapers in Colorado and Ohio. A Cleveland native, Bender is a proud alumnus of The Ohio State University, where he studied U.S. cultural and political history and suffered through the endless disappointments of the John Cooper era. He lives on the Hill with his daughter, who starts Kindergarten later this month.

I hope you’ll all join me in welcoming Mike to the family.