Michael S. Schmidt (born September 1983) is a two time Pulitzer prize winning American journalist, author, and correspondent for The New York Times in Washington, D.C. He covers national security and federal law enforcement, and has broken several high-profile stories. He is also a national security contributor for MSNBC and NBC News.

Among the major stories he has broken was the existence of Hillary Clinton private email server. During the Trump presidency, he broke several major stories, including about the Mueller investigation, other investigations of Trump and Trump's efforts to overturn the election.

In 2018, he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work the previous year. He won one of the Pulitzer Prizes for breaking the news that President Trump had asked the FBI director James Comey for a loyalty pledge, and to close the federal investigation into Michael Flynn. That story led the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate President Trump.

With another reporter at the Times, Schmidt won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about sexual harassment allegations against Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly that led to Fox firing O'Reilly. He shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the 2018 Gerald Loeb Award for Investigative business journalism for stories on the sexual predator allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein that led to the rise of the Me Too movement.

In September 2020, Schmidt's first book, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President , was released by Penguin Random House. The book received positive reviews and rose to number three on The New York Times Best Seller list and number two on both Amazon and number two on the Wall Street Journal 's best-seller list.

Earlier in Schmidt's career he was a sports reporter and broke several major stories about doping in baseball including that Sammy Sosa, David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez has tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.