Charlie Savage

Savage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington correspondent for the New York Times. Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Savage graduated from Harvard College and earned a master’s degree from Yale Law School as part of a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship.

He has been covering post-9/11 issues-including national security, individual rights and the rule of law-since 2003, when he was a reporter for the Miami Herald. Later that year, he joined the Washington bureau of the Boston Globe; he then moved to the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 2008. He has also co-taught a seminar on national security and the Constitution at Georgetown University’s political science department.

His first book, Takeover, chronicles the Bush-Cheney administration’s efforts to expand presidential power. His second book, Power Wars, is an investigative history of national- security legal policy during the Obama administration.

His other journalism honors include the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award; the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation’s Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency; the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism; and the Constitution Project’s Award for Constitutional Commentary.

He is a former public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and is presently a member of the steering committee for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Savage is also a NBC/MSNBC contributor.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times Washington correspondent Charlie Savage presents

“Power Wars: Bush, Obama, Trump, and the Post-9/11 Presidency”

Barack Obama campaigned on changing George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” but ended up entrenching extraordinary executive powers, from warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention, to military commissions and targeted killings. Then Obama found himself bequeathing those authorities to Donald Trump, who was ready to open the throttle on hard-power approaches to fighting terrorism – accepting greater risk of civil-liberties violations at home and civilian casualties abroad. At the same time, Trump’s actions have raised new executive power debates, from his attacks on the free press and his ban on visitors from certain Muslim-majority countries to his pushback against the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Charlie Savage takes audiences on a journey, telling them insider stories and offering expert analysis to help make sense of the era of political stress upon the Constitution that the United States – and world – has been living through.

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