Background
Schmidt grew up in Nyack, New York, and went to high school in Richmond, Virginia.
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Michael Schmidt
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Education
He graduated from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania in 2005 with an Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs after founding and editing Marooned.
Career
In 2004, Schmidt worked at The Boston Globe. Schmidt began working for The Times as a news clerk in 2005. In December 2007, he was made a staff reporter, covering performance-enhancing drugs and legal issues in sports.
In 2009, Schmidt broke the stories that David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and Sammy Sosa were among the roughly 100 players who tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2003.
In 2010, Schmidt broke the story about how the firm of baseball super agent Scott Boras had provided tens of thousands of dollars in loans to a young prospect, raising questions about whether Boras" firm had broken rules designed to prevent players from being exploited. Schmidt was a correspondent for The Times in Iraq in 2011.
During his time in Iraq, he uncovered a series of classified documents in a junkyard in Baghdad. The documents were testimony from Marines about the 2005 Haditha Massacre.
In that incident, the Marines had killed 26 Iraqi civilians.
The story, which ran as American troops were leaving Iraq in 2011, was widely praised. In 2012, he became a Washington correspondent for The Times, covering national security and federal law enforcement. In March of 2015, Schmidt broke the story that Hillary Rodham Clinton had exclusively used a personal email account when she was secretary of state.
The story prompted Mistress
Clinton to announce that she would release all of her work related emails from her time in office. Since breaking the story, he has been the lead reporter covering the Hillary Clinton email controversy.
Defenders of Mistress Clinton have said that Schmidt"s coverage of her is not fair and he has been frequently criticized by the group Media Matters
In May 2015, Schmidt was part of a group of Times reporters who broke a series of stories about the Justice Department charging Fédération internationale de football association executives.
Schmidt was in the lobby of a hotel in Switzerland when law enforcement officers arrested the executives. In December 2015, a New York Times story by Schmidt and Apuzzo (written together with Julia Preston) criticized the United States government for missing crucial evidence during the visa vetting process for a woman who would later become one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attack.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation dismissed the reporting as "garble" and it turned out that rather than having "talked openly on social media about her views on violent jihad" as stated in the NYT article, she had mentioned these in private communications. The New York Times" public editor called for "systemic changes" after these articles by Schmidt and his coauthors (both of which had relied on anonymous government sources), describing these problems as a "red alert" highlighting the need for more diligent and skeptical reporting and editing.
