David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent and a senior writer at The New York Times. In a 40-year reporting career, he has been on three Times teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age, examines the emergence of cyberconflict as the primary way large and small states are competing and undercutting each other, changing the nature of global power. Mr. Sanger has been the executive producer of two HBO national security documentaries: “The Perfect Weapon” (2020), which was nominated for an Emmy Award, and “Year One” (2022), an account of the Biden administration’s first year. He is also the author of two Times best sellers on foreign policy and national security: The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power and Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.
Mr. Sanger has served as Tokyo bureau chief, Washington economic correspondent, White House correspondent during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and chief Washington correspondent. He was a leading member of the team that investigated the causes of the Challenger disaster in 1986, which was awarded a Pulitzer in national reporting the following year. A second Pulitzer, in 1999, was awarded to a team that investigated the struggles within the Clinton administration over controlling technology exports to China. He is a contributor to CNN and an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government, where, with Graham Allison, he co-teaches “Central Challenges in American National Security, Strategy and the Press. He is a 1982 graduate of Harvard College and a member of the Aspen Strategy Group.