ProPublica has hired four reporters — Cate Brown, Aaron Davis, Joel Schectman and Byron Tau — to join the Washington bureau. The team, led by Assistant Managing Editor Peter Finn, will pursue accountability journalism focused on national security issues and the financial and other interests driving foreign and military policies.
“The arrival of four outstanding journalists, who will join an already robust team in Washington, is another measure of ProPublica’s commitment to coverage of the Trump administration and how it is changing D.C., America and the world,” Finn said.
Cate Brown joins ProPublica from The Guardian, where she investigated the global reach of President Donald Trump’s administration, including the organizations, agency leaders and businesspeople reshaping Washington’s relationship with the world. She previously worked as a reporter and international investigations researcher for The Washington Post, where she documented the civilian toll of wars in the Middle East, including deadly strikes on Yemeni journalists, African migrants, United Nations aid workers and Palestinian children.
Brown and her teammates were cited by the Overseas Press Club for their in-depth investigative series on cross-border repression in 2024 and awarded the inaugural Shireen Abu Akleh Award for coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, work that was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting.
“ProPublica has proven over and over again that it has the tenacity and courage to uncover important truths,” Brown said. “I can’t wait to get started.”
Aaron Davis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and three-time finalist, joins ProPublica from The Washington Post, where he led or collaborated on some of the paper’s most distinguished accountability reporting over the last two decades. Davis was a lead writer and reporter on the Post’s investigative series into the causes, costs and aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was awarded a George Polk Award, a Toner Prize and, with other Post coverage, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for public service. He was also a member of a reporting team that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting as well as the Toner Prize in 2018 for coverage credited with changing the course of a U.S. Senate race in Alabama.
Over the last three years, Davis was part of a reporting duo at the Post that dug deeply into the politicization of the Justice Department, exposing how the FBI waited over a year to open an investigation into the Trump campaign following Jan. 6 and how Trump appointees scuttled an investigation into whether the president had illegally taken money from the president of Egypt during his first run for the White House. His reporting culminated last year with the release of the New York Times bestseller “Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department.”
“The clarity of ProPublica’s mission to pursue investigative journalism in the public interest has never been more important,” Davis said. “I’m thrilled to join such a talented team and to get to spend every day working to hold our government accountable for its actions.”
Joel Schectman is an investigative reporter who has spent more than 10 years writing exposés on espionage, covert surveillance and U.S. psychological and influence operations. He comes to ProPublica from The Wall Street Journal, where he investigated Chevron’s relationship with the CIA in Venezuela, the spy agency’s secret role in a historic AI deal and how the Pentagon spread UFO mythology.
Prior to his time at the Journal, Schectman spent nearly nine years at Reuters, where he exposed a rogue National Security Agency surveillance program in the United Arab Emirates, a Pentagon campaign that stoked vaccine hesitancy at the height of the pandemic and the failures of the CIA to protect its informants in Iran. Schectman has won five National Press Club awards for stories on defense and intelligence. His work has also been recognized by the Loeb Awards, the Ford Presidential Foundation and the Overseas Press Club.
“I’m excited to join ProPublica, where we’ll bring accountability journalism to the most shadowy corridors of American power,” Schectman said.
Byron Tau joins ProPublica from The Associated Press, where he spent the past two years investigating government surveillance, technology and law enforcement. That work included an investigation into the Border Patrol’s use of hidden license plate readers to track American drivers in the interior of the United States, part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series “Made in America, Watched Worldwide,” which also earned the Overseas Press Club’s Malcolm Forbes & Morton Frank Award.
Before his time at the AP, Tau helped launch NOTUS, where he broke stories on technology and national security, including a joint investigation with several news organizations into the phone-tracking tool Locate X. Earlier in his career, Tau spent nearly nine years at The Wall Street Journal, where his award-winning series on the government’s purchases of commercial data became the basis for his book, “Means of Control,” which examined how data brokers feed consumer information to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He began his career at Politico, covering the Obama administration, the 2012 presidential campaign and the lobbying industry in Washington.
“In a democracy, citizens deserve to know what their government is doing. That fundamental principle is more important than ever when the topic is national security and the stakes can be life and death,” Tau said.
