Heidi Przybyla joins POLITICO as national investigative correspondent

Heidi Przybyla

Announcement from Managing Editor, Enterprise Peter Canellos and Executive Editor Dafna Linzer:

We are thrilled to announced that Heidi Przybyla is joining our permanent staff as national investigative correspondent. She is the definition of a high-impact Washington reporter after 16 years as a political, congressional and White House reporter for Bloomberg followed by stints as an enterprise reporter at USA Today and correspondent at NBC News. She is equally comfortable in front of a keyboard or camera, covering a presidential debate or digging into a policy investigation. As a POLITICO contributor, she broke important new ground with a series of investigative scoops on GOP efforts in advance of the midterms to recruit and train supposedly non-partisan poll workers. Now, she will report to Peter Canellos doing investigative and A1 stories, working with colleagues across the newsroom, and utilizing her wide array of sources to help us compete on stories central to the intersection of policy, power and politics.

Heidi’s years on the White House and congressional beats included such major events as 9/11 and the Iraq War, along with years of brinksmanship between the parties over budget and tax priorities. In 2016, she was USA Today’s lead reporter on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. More recently, her timely news and investigative reporting has forced candidates to shift positions and acknowledge uncomfortable truths about their records. Hours after her report on then-candidate Joe Biden’s longtime support for the anti-abortion Hyde Amendment, he reversed himself and repudiated his former position.

During the Trump administration, she was the first reporter to obtain a memo to the FBI and texts showing that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was in touch with former classmates in advance of sexual harassment claims that later became public. One day after her report warning of serious cardiac dangers from hydroxychloroquine — the drug President Donald Trump touted without evidence as a treatment for Covid-19 — the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology issued a public warning. She also revealed through internal health department documents that Trump’s political apppointees overruled career staff to cancel a federal program to prevent teen pregnancy. Days later, HHS agreed to modify its earlier decision to cancel the program outright. And she was first to report the contours of the first set of articles of impeachment against then-President Trump in 2019.

Her most recent focus has been on exposing efforts by political operatives to alter longstanding election practices and procedures. Her reporting on the state of democracy in the U.S., followed by a number of competitors, has shown that even those candidates and officials who’ve sought to distance themselves from Trump’s most explosive claims are nonetheless willing to seek partisan advantage by manipulating the system.

Heidi will join us officially on October 11. Please welcome her and congratulate her on her new role.