The harried scribes of this most frenetic of elections went after the 2016 candidates with gusto, vetting their financial dealings, their autobiographies, their foreign ties and yes, their email habits.
Here are the stories that had the biggest impact:
1. “Bridge Jam’s Cause a Mystery” By Ted Mann and Heather Haddon, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 17, 2013
Sparked by a Bergen Record column, the Wall Street Journal methodically built out the unusual closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge into the “Bridgegate” scandal from this first story. The Journal coverage just resulted in the conviction of two former aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, once thought to be a bona fide presidential contender. As the story grew, Christie’s candidacy eroded, crumbled -- and then dissolved. He dropped out of the Republican primary after a humiliating sixth-place finish in New Hampshire, then endorsed Donald Trump.
2. “Foreign Government Gifts to Clinton Foundation on the Rise,” by James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhous, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 17, 2015, and “Foreign governments gave millions to foundation while Clinton was at State Dept.,” by Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, Washington Post, Feb. 25, 2015
Even before Hillary Clinton officially became a presidential candidate, news outlets were poking around on her family foundation’s courtship of foreign ties. And they found plenty to question.
3. “In 2002, Donald Trump Said He Supported Invading Iraq,” by Andrew Kaczynski and Nathan McDermott, BuzzFeed, Feb. 18, 2016
Trump insists he opposed the Iraq war before the 2003 invasion, but he’s never been able to prove it. BuzzFeed’s in-house oppo shop, which has since departed for CNN, unearthed an interview with radio host Howard Stern in which Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so” when asked if he supported the looming invasion. Trump has struggled to explain the discrepancy.
4. “Hillary Clinton Used Personal Email Account at State Dept., Possibly Breaking Rules,” by Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times, March 2, 2015
This New York Times scoop opened a can of worms for Hillary Clinton and her team, and they’re squirming still. No story has put more pressure on Clinton than this one. Three days later, the AP followed up with the news that she’d been running a “homebrew” server in her Chappaqua manse, giving the story rocket fuel.
5. “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” by Jo Becker and Mike Mcintire, New York Times, April 23, 2015
Many reporters got a piece of the Clinton Foundation story, but this Times investigation -- built on the back of “Clinton Cash,” a muckraking book by conservative author Peter Schweizer -- alerted the press corps to the snaky conflict-of-interest problems presented by the three-way collision of fundraising, influence and Madame Secretary’s service in Foggy Bottom.
6. “A tale of two Carsons,” by Scott Glover and Maeve Reston, CNN, Nov. 7, 2015
Dr. Ben Carson was never serious threat to win the Republican nomination, but Glover and Reston’s reporting made sure of it: Their questioning of his narrative of personal redemption set off a wave of skeptical reporting that helped doom his candidacy and allowed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to win the Iowa caucuses.
7. “Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex,” by Tim Mak and Brandy Zadrozny, The Daily Beast, July 27, 2015
A prelude of sorts to the summer of 2016 stories about Donald Trump’s loose and lewd ways with women, this piece drew on divorce proceedings between Trump and his first wife, Ivana, to paint him as a brute. The story also exposed the vicious hardball style of Trump’s legal team, which threatened to do “fucking disgusting” things to reporter Tim Mak if he published it.
8. “Delegate math: Clinton Wins, and How AP Counts Delegates,” by Hope Yen, Associated Press, June 7, 2016
The AP methodically counted the Democratic delegates to convincingly confirm that Hillary Clinton would win her party’s nomination. Her victory was no stunner; what was surprising was that the AP announced its whip count as soon as she reached the magic number, a day before the last major primaries and ahead of every other news outlet.
9. “Bernie Sanders Has a Secret,” by Michael Kruse, POLITICO, July 9, 2015
Nobody knew that much about where Bernie Sanders came from and how his family grew until POLITICO followed the paper trail all the way down to his roots -- and learned the true identity of his son’s mother.
10. WikiLeaks of Hacked Democrat National Committee Emails, by various news sites, July 22, 2016
WikiLeaks doesn’t write stories, but its publication of raw documents this campaign season provided fodder for everybody in the press corps — and the public — about how politics work. It also spelled the end of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s tenure as DNC chair.
11. “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief,” by Andrew E. Kramer, Mike McIntire and Barry Meier, Aug. 14, 2016, and “Manafort tied to undisclosed foreign lobbying,” by Jeff Horwitz And Desmond Butler, Associated Press, Aug. 17, 2016
Paul Manafort was running the Trump for president campaign until the New York Times revealed that he may have received $12.7 million in under-the-table payments for his work in Ukraine, the AP reported that he secretly routed $2.2 million in foreign money to a couple Washington lobbying shops, waging a “covert influence campaign.” POLITICO exposed his ties to a Ukrainian political operative linked to Russian intelligence on Aug. 18, and he resigned a day later.
12. David A. Fahrenthold’s complete Washington Post coverage of the Trump Foundation, June through November 2016
Fahrenthold asked one question again and again — “Where does the Trump Foundation money come from and where does it go” — to expose the candidate as a cheapskate and charity grifter. It started with exploding Trump’s false claim that he’d raised $6 million for veterans’ charities, and ended with this devastating portrait of him as a real-life Ebenezer Scrooge.
13. “Donald Trump Tax Records Show He Could Have Avoided Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, The Times Found,” by David Barstow, Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner and Megan Twohey, New York Times, Oct. 1, 2016
Donald Trump promised to release his income tax returns, but then didn’t, claiming he couldn’t do so while under audit. So reporters started digging for what became the Holy Grail of 2016 scoops. In May, the Washington Post got a taste, reporting that Trump hadn’t pay federal income taxes for at least two years during the late 1970s. In June, POLITICO discovered an additional two tax-free years. Then, a tipster mailed the Times’ Susanne Craig copies of pages from Trump’s state income tax returns, which show he may have not paid much income tax at all. “That makes me smart,” he said during his first debate with Hillary Clinton.
14. “‘Apprentice’ Cast and Crew Say Trump Was Lewd and Sexist,” by Garance Bruke, Associated Press, Oct. 3, 2016
Donald Trump’s stone-age attitudes about women got a full airing when 20 (!) people who worked on his show, The Apprentice, ratted him out to the Associated Press.
15. “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005,” by David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post, Oct. 8, 2016
The Associated Press’ Apprentice story caused the NBC-owned program Access Hollywood to dig up some old tapes of Donald Trump talking candidly to host Billy Bush about grabbing women’s genitals. When NBC News didn’t promptly turn the story around, a leaker reached Fahrenthold -- yep, him again -- and he got the story up in hours. When Trump, who dismissed his hot-mic boasts as “locker room talk,” said he’d never groped women, a dozen of them came forward to say: Yes, he did.
16. WikiLeaks of the Hacked John Podesta Emails, WikiLeaks, by various news sites, October
WikiLeaks struck again, publishing tens of thousands of John Podesta’s emails, which the Clinton campaign chairman says were stolen by Russian hackers. Like the previous WikiLeaks dump, the messages gave an unrestricted view into the methodical and controlling way the Clinton campaign operates. Clinton’s foe Donald Trump used the emails to denigrate his opponent, while the press is still feasting on each daily document dump.