Carol D. Leonnig
Carol Duhurst Leonnig is an American investigative journalist. She has been a staff writer at The Washington Post since 2000, and was part of a team of national security reporters that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting, which revealed the NSA's expanded spying on Americans. Leonnig also received Pulitzer Prizes for National Reporting in 2015 and 2018.
Carol Duhurst Leonnig
c. 1966
John Reeder[1]
Early life[edit]
Leonnig is a native of Upper Marlboro in Prince George's County, Maryland. She graduated from Queen Anne School, a former college preparatory school, in Leeland, Maryland, in 1983. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1987.[1]
Awards[edit]
In 2018, Leonnig was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting as a contributor to 10 stories on the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election with The Washington Post.[10]
In 2015, Leonnig won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting "for her smart, persistent coverage of the Secret Service, its security lapses and the ways in which the agency neglected its vital task: the protection of the President of the United States."[11]
The Washington Post received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of the National Security Agency's expanded surveillance of everyday Americans based on former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's disclosures. Leonnig was part of the reporting team whose six months of revelatory work exposed the government's secret collection of records for all Americans' phone calls and electronic communications. The team also uncovered how a secret court had authorized much of the communication collection under secret law. Despite President Obama's claims that the court provided a key check on the NSA's spying power, The Post team revealed how the court's top judges had belatedly learned that the NSA had been violating the court's rules to protect innocent individuals' privacy for years—in fact, from the day the surveillance programs began. The court's chief judge later acknowledged to the Post it had no way to check the NSA's claims that it was properly safeguarding privacy.[12]
Also in 2014, Leonnig was a winner of the George Polk Award for investigative reporting, given by Long Island University, for her 2013 work uncovering a bribery scandal involving Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.[13]
In 2005, Leonnig was part of a seven-person team that won the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting given by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California for a series of articles that uncovered unhealthy levels of lead in the drinking water in Washington, D.C., and problems with reporting water quality across the U.S.[14][15]
She is also a former Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow.[16]