Richard Miniter

Richard Miniter (born 1967) is an American investigative journalist and author whose articles have appeared in Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The New Republic, National Review, PJ Media, and Reader’s Digest.

A former editorial writer and columnist for The Wall Street Journal in Europe, as well as a member of the investigative reporting team of the Sunday Times of London, he is currently the National Security columnist for Forbes.

He also authored three New York Times best-selling books, Losing bin Laden, Shadow War, Leading From Behind, and most recently Eyes On Target.

Miniter worked for the Dow Jones Newswires during the summers of 1987 and 1988.

In 1989, he was a summer fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies.

He later worked as an environmental policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

He studied philosophy at Vassar College, graduating in 1990.

He was an editor of the Vassar Spectator, one of the school's student periodicals, where he worked with Mark Thiessen and Jonathan Karl.

From 1992 to 1994, Miniter was an associate producer of the PBS talk show TechnoPolitics.

In 1996, he produced a radio series profiling female executives and entrepreneurs, Enterprising Women, that was distributed to more than a hundred radio stations in the United States.

He was also a fellow and senior editor of the Hudson Institute.

Miniter published in a number of newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times (London), South China Morning Post, and Australian Financial Review.

He travelled to South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya to write about modern-day slavery for The Atlantic Monthly in "The False Promise of Slave Redemption".

Hired by The Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley in 2000, Miniter was sent to Brussels as an editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal Europe and editor of its weekly "Business Europe" column.

He also wrote a weekly column, "The Visible Hand", for The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal.com.

Miniter left the Journal after less than two years to take a position with the Centre for the New Europe in Brussels, Belgium.

He left there after a short stint as a senior fellow.

Miniter's first book, The Myth of Market Share, was published in 2002 by Crown Publishing, an imprint of Random House.

The book asserts that business strategy that focuses on increasing market share is wrong-headed and distracts from profit-seeking.

According to a review by The Washington Post, the book "although at times repetitious ... makes it clear why there is zero correlation between profitability and market share."

In 2003, Miniter's Losing bin Laden, was published.

The book is the result of eighteen months of reporting from Khartoum, Cairo, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Washington, D.C. It offers an account of United States policy relating to Al Qaeda and bin Laden during the Clinton administration.

Miniter was the editorial page editor and Vice President of Opinion at The Washington Times from March until October 2009.

Miniter later sued for breach of contract and other claims.

In September 2010, the case of Miniter v. Moon et al. and the related EEOC complaint was settled.

Miniter refused to disclose the terms, but said "I am very, very happy with the equitable and just result."

Miniter wrote the "National Security" column for Forbes.com.

In 2012, Richard Miniter founded the American Media Institute, a 501(3)(c) non-profit organization that provides investigative news stories to leading newspapers, magazines, radio and television news outlets around the world.

In April 2014, Miniter was included by CSPAN's Brian Lamb in his book Sundays At Eight, as one of Lamb's top 40 book author interviews of the past 25 years for Miniter's investigative work on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Miniter was born in New York City and grew up in Rosendale, New York.

Among his siblings are several writers and journalists, including Frank Miniter, executive editor of American Hunter magazine, and Brendan Miniter, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, who is the editor of the book The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs.

Miniter's June 2014 Forbes exposé of President Joseph Kabila, the leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo, reportedly provoked Kabila's younger brother, Zoe, to beat unconscious Congo parliament speaker Évariste Boshab.

The Kabila family accused Boshab of having been an anonymous source for Miniter's article, which estimated President Kabila had extracted and secreted away as much as $15 billion from the impoverished Congo.

Miniter wrote a regular national security column for Forbes.com.

and wrote about the growing al Qaeda presence in Africa—the same presence that has been implicated in the recent attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Richard Miniter's attendance at a controversial 2014 Passover dinner hosted by Israel's ambassador to the U.S. was revealed pursuant to an Israeli Supreme Court order in 2016.

Ambassador Ron Dermer had fought media requests for information about the gathering, but the court rejected his argument that Israel's national security required the guest list to remain secret.

Miniter was one of three American journalists present at the Seder, which was also attended by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Richard Miniter started Zenger News, a digital news wire, in 2019.

The company, which has now grown to 5,000 correspondents in 120 countries, distributes content to over 400 news outlets across the U.S.