Rachael Bade

Bade was raised in Ohio, and received a BA in political science and journalism from the University of Dayton in 2010. Before her journalism career, she was a classical ballet dancer, training during summers with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Ballet Austin and American Ballet Theatre.

Bade started her journalism career in 2010 as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call. She joined Politico in 2012 to cover taxes, a beat that launched her career when the IRS targeting controversy broke. Bade closely followed the House Republican investigation of the IRS's treatment of conservative tax-exempt groups and was the only reporter to interview Lois Lerner, the IRS leader at the heart of the scandal who asserted her Fifth Amendment right on Capitol Hill, refusing to answer investigators' questions.[15][16]

Bade later covered the Republican Party's investigation of the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack and the party's subsequent probe of Hillary Clinton's private email use. She was promoted to Politico's Congress team in early 2016, where she wrote about Speaker Paul Ryan's leadership, winning an award for a magazine profile that first reported on Ryan's decision to step down from Congress.[17] She spent three years covering House Republicans and the party's transformation under Donald Trump, filing stories that illuminated Republican infighting over the future of the party and providing information about how policy decisions were made.

Bade joined The Washington Post as a congressional reporter in 2019 to cover House Democrats' oversight of the Trump administration.[16] She helped lead the publication's coverage of the Trump impeachment inquiry before turning her work into a book.

Based on more than 250 interviews with lawmakers, White House officials and aides who worked on the Trump impeachments, Bade's book "Unchecked" "flips the script on what readers think they know about the two impeachments of Donald Trump," according to a description of the book. [18] It "weaves a vivid narrative of how House Democrats under the lead of a cautious speaker, Nancy Pelosi, hesitated for months to stand up to Trump—and then pulled punches in their effort to oust him in a misguided effort to protect themselves politically."[19]

News from the book, as well as excerpts therein, appeared in The Washington Post,[20] twice[21] in Politico Magazine,[22] The Atlantic,[23] twice[24] in Fox News,[25] Politico Playbook,[26] Huffington Post,[27] the Los Angela's Times,[28] West Wing Playbook,[29] The Intercept[30] and The Washington Examiner.[31] Bade left The Washington Post in December 2020 and rejoined Politico in early 2021 to take the helm of Playbook. [32][33]

In February 2022, Bade announced that she was expecting a baby girl in the summer of 2022 after undergoing five rounds of in vitro fertilization.[34]

• Appearances on C-SPAN