Jeff Gerth

Jeff Gerth is an American investigative reporter. He spent several years at The New York Times, writing lengthy, probing stories. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for covering the transfer of American satellite-launch technology to China.

In March 1992, Gerth revealed that beginning in 1978, while Bill Clinton was Arkansas attorney general, he and his wife Hillary were partners in an Ozark real estate deal with James B. McDougal. When Clinton was governor, McDougal controlled a bank and Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan. Gerth's stories raised the question of whether it was appropriate for a governor to be in business partnership with someone having immediate financial interests in an industry regulated by the state. Other criticisms centered on the unclear time line - it was difficult to pick out that Bill Clinton was attorney general, not governor, at the time the partnership was created, and that Jim McDougal did not own a business regulated by the state until passage of the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act in 1982, four years after creation of the partnership. (See The Hunting of the President, particularly the book.)

Gerth reported a controversial Sunday meeting between Clinton and his personal secretary, Betty Currie. At the meeting, according to Currie, Clinton asked her a number of sensitive questions, including whether she remembered his ever being alone with Monica Lewinsky. FBI investigators waved the story in front of Lee as they interrogated him.

In 2004, Gerth was a visiting professor at Princeton University, where he taught an undergraduate seminar on investigative reporting. He left The New York Times in 2005, and joined the staff of ProPublica in February 2008.

With his former colleague at The New York Times, Don Van Natta, Jr., Gerth wrote an investigative biography about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton entitled, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was published in June 2007 by Little, Brown and Company. Gerth and Van Natta were reportedly offered a $1 million advance.

His New York Times articles on Wen Ho Lee are mentioned in the play Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang. In Yellow Face, Gerth's character is only referred to as "Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel".

On January 30, 2023, Gerth published in the Columbia Journalism Review what his editor called an "encyclopedic look at one of the most consequential moments in American media history," the U.S. media's coverage of Trump's alleged role in the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. The four-part series was entitled "The press versus the president." After an introduction by Kyle Pope, Gerth's series was published. Some journalists pushed back against Gerth's assertions, among them David Corn, Joe Conason, Jonathan Chait, Rachel Maddow, Cathy Young, Dan Kennedy, and Duncan Campbell. Andrew Prokop mentioned Gerth's series and grouped him together with other journalists that he labeled "Trump-Russia revisionists" including Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.

Gerth appears in the 2025 documentary Cover-Up, speaking about his work with Seymour Hersh.

Personal life

Gerth married at age thirty-nine and became a father a year later. His wife Janice O'Connell worked on the Foreign Relations Committee for Senator Christopher Dodd, who during the 1996 presidential campaign chaired the Democratic National Committee. Gerth recused himself from any campaign coverage.