WSJ reporter Rothfeld hired by New York Times

We’re very excited to announce that Michael Rothfeld, one of the finest investigative reporters around, is joining the investigative unit on the Metro desk. His hiring is another sign of our robust commitment to local investigative reporting at The Times, whether long-term projects (our taxi series) or deep dives off the news (our piece on Jeffrey Epstein behind bars).

For the past seven years, Michael has been an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where he and a colleague revealed that President Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid $130,000 to silence the porn star Stormy Daniels weeks before the 2016 election. He was a leader of the Journal team awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of two election-year hush money deals made on behalf of Mr. Trump and of the federal investigation of Mr. Cohen. A book Michael wrote with Joe Palazzolo based on that work and tentatively titled “The Fixers” is scheduled to be published by Random House in January.

Michael’s reporting in 2017 on irregular loans made to Paul Manafort led to the criminal prosecution of the Chicago banker and Trump campaign adviser who engineered them. As a statehouse reporter at The Los Angeles Times from 2007 to 2010, he wrote stories on abuses of government perks that led to the ouster of members of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cabinet. Michael spent seven years at Newsday on Long Island covering local and state government, and started his daily newspaper career as a suburban correspondent at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

His arrival on Metro brings Michael full circle, as he got his start in journalism in the 1990s pedaling his bike around the city chasing stories for the Manhattan Spirit, a weekly community paper.

Michael starts on Metro next month. Please welcome him.