Jane Mayer

Jane Meredith Mayer (born 1955) is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995.

She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the United States Predator Drone program; Donald Trump's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz; and Trump's financial backer, Robert Mercer.

Mayer attended two private non-secondary schools: Fieldston, in the northwest area of the Bronx borough of New York City; and—as an exchange student in 1972-1973—Bedales, a boarding school in the village of Steep, Hampshire, England.

A 1977 magna cum laude graduate of Yale University, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as senior editor of the Yale Daily News and as campus stringer for Time magazine.

Mayer began her career as a journalist in Vermont writing for two small weekly papers, The Weathersfield Weekly and The Black River Tribune, before moving to the daily Rutland Herald.

She worked as a metropolitan reporter for the now-defunct Washington Star, and in 1982 joined The Wall Street Journal, where she worked for 12 years.

She was the first woman at the WSJ to be named White House correspondent, and subsequently, senior writer and front page editor.

She served as a war correspondent and foreign correspondent for the Journal, where she reported on the bombing of the American barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the last days of Communism in the former Soviet Union.

Mayer also contributes to the New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Prospect.

Mayer has co-authored two books: Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (1994) (co-authored with Jill Abramson), a study of the nomination and appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court; and Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988 (1989; co-authored with Doyle McManus), an account of Ronald Reagan's second term in the White House.

Strange Justice was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and both books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Time magazine said of Strange Justice: "Its portrait of Thomas as an id suffering in the role of a Republican superego is more detailed and convincing than anything that has appeared so far."

Of Landslide, The New York Times Washington correspondent Steven V. Roberts said, "This is clearly a reporter's book, full of rich anecdote and telling detail.... I am impressed with the amount of inside information collected here."

In an Elle magazine interview, Mayer said about her next article, "I'm focusing broadly on stories about abuses of power, threats to democracy, and corruption."

In 1997, she wrote an article about "dubious Democratic Party fundraising tactics leading to the 1996 election."

The article described how the Clinton campaign "marketed the prestige and glamour of the Presidency as never before."

Strange Justice was adapted as a 1999 Showtime television movie of the same name, starring Delroy Lindo, Mandy Patinkin, and Regina Taylor.

In a story appearing the same day in The New York Times, reporter Scott Shane reported Mayer's book as disclosing International Committee of the Red Cross officials had concluded in a secret report in 2007: "the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."

Mayer said of her book: "I see myself more as a reporter than as an advocate."

Mayer covered the Obama administration's prosecution of whistleblowers with an article about former National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas Drake.

Mayer wrote that despite Obama's campaign promises of transparency, his administration "has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness."

She won the Polk Award for the article, and the judges said her article helped expose "prosecutorial excess" and "helped lead to all major charges against Drake being dropped."

Mayer's third nonfiction book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (2008), addresses the origins, legal justifications, and possible war crimes liability of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (commonly considered torture) on detainees and the subsequent deaths of detainees, sometimes victims of mistaken identity, under such interrogation by the CIA and DOD.

The roles of Dick Cheney and attorneys David Addington and John Yoo in providing cover for the grisly procedures were prominent.

The book was a finalist for the National Book Awards.

In her New York Times review of The Dark Side, Jennifer Schuessler described the book as "the most vivid and comprehensive account we have so far of how a government founded on checks and balances and respect for individual rights could have been turned against those ideals."

The Times subsequently named The Dark Side one of its ten most notable books of the year.

Military and diplomatic historian Colonel Andrew J. Bacevich, reviewing the book in The Washington Post, wrote: "[Mayer's] achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces."

Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick reported that Mayer's book revealed that a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst warned the Bush administration that "up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake."

The administration ignored the warning and insisted that all were enemy combatants.

In 2009, Mayer covered the Obama administration's use of drones.

"The number of Drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President", she wrote.

Her article described errors, ethical concerns, and potential unintended consequences in the increased use of Drone strikes.

Mayer has written about money in politics for many years, covering and criticizing both liberals and conservatives.

In 2016, Mayer's book Dark Money—in which she investigated the history of the conservative fundraising Koch brothers—was published to critical acclaim.

Mayer was born in New York City.

Her mother, Meredith (née Nevins), is a painter, print-maker and former president of the Manhattan Graphics Center.

Her father, William Mayer, was a composer.

Her paternal great-great-grandfather was Emanuel Lehman, one of the founders of Lehman Brothers.

Her maternal grandparents were Mary Fleming (Richardson) and Allan Nevins, a historian and John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s authorized biographer.