Dan is well suited for this role after working on the Politics desk for the past decade. He has established himself as one of our sharpest and most agile editors, elevating our daily report by driving scoops and accountability reporting on some of journalism’s most competitive beats. He was the unrelenting force behind The Post’s revelatory coverage of Donald Trump, from the first days of his campaign through the final days of his presidency. With his zeal for a killer story, adroitness at landing a breaking story on deadline and compassionate management style, Dan has earned the affection and loyalty of his reporters.
As Washington Editor, Dan has overseen the White House and Congress teams as they have reported on President Biden’s struggles to contain covid, exit Afghanistan and tame inflation and the internal battles reshaping both political parties. Dan has helped shape our coverage of the war in Ukraine and was a key editor of The Post’s sweeping Jan. 6 investigation, “The Attack: Before, During and After,” which received the George Polk Award for national reporting and the Toner Prize for excellence in political reporting. In recent weeks, he has helped drive a stream of exclusive reports on classified presidential records that ended up at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida as well as the “Texting through an insurrection” narrative using Mark Meadows’s text messages to reconstruct the events of Jan. 6.
Dan became an editor in 2013 to run The Post’s White House coverage and then served as campaign editor for the 2016 presidential race. Over the next four years, Dan led our award-winning White House coverage, conceiving of and shepherding compelling tick-tocks that took readers inside the administration, as well as ambitious investigations that documented how the Trump White House mishandled the covid pandemic and other crises. Dan also helped edit some of the coverage of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election that received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2018.
Dan joined The Post in 1997 as a Metro reporter in the Manassas bureau and then worked in the Fairfax bureau before joining the National staff in 2001, at the dawn of the George W. Bush administration. As a Justice Department reporter over the next seven years, Dan played a central role in covering the 9/11 attacks, the war on terrorism and the 9/11 commission. He was part of a Post team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2002 for its coverage of the war on terrorism. He covered the last year of the Bush White House in 2008 before covering money in politics and the rise of super PACs during the first term of the Obama administration.
Dan spent most of his childhood in Minnesota, earned a B.A. in political science from the University of Minnesota and previously worked as a reporter at the Des Moines Register and at the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger. Dan is the father of two daughters, Maddie and Olivia, and lives in Columbia Heights with his two dogs, Zeus and Apollo, and a very demanding cat named Emma.
