Hafiz Rashid
Hafiz Rashid covers the legal and procedural machinery around American politics, focusing on how courts, election officials, and government records systems constrain or enable political power. He writes for the New Republic on high-stakes disputes over transparency, voting rules, and the integrity of democratic processes, treating legal filings and administrative orders as primary documents of political life rather than background noise.
Court orders, records, and the rule of law
Rashid’s coverage centers on how judges and litigants fight over political power through paperwork, injunctions, and emergency motions. In a piece on a judge’s emergency order to stop Donald Trump from destroying records, he treats the preservation of documents as a live political battlefield rather than a technicality, explaining how a records fight can shape accountability for a former president. Across his recent work, he gravitates to cases where courts are asked to police the behavior of powerful political actors, whether through restraining orders, enforcement of subpoenas, or battles over discovery. His reporting often walks through what a ruling does in practical terms — what is blocked, what must be produced, which deadlines move — translating dense legal language into straightforward political consequences. He tends to foreground the stakes for institutional accountability and the precedent a decision might set for future conflicts over presidential power, election administration, or government secrecy.
Elections, ballot access, and democratic safeguards
A recurring thread in Rashid’s bylines is the vulnerability and resilience of U.S. election systems. He writes frequently on legal challenges to ballot access, attempts to disqualify or protect certain candidates, and fights over how votes are counted and certified. His headlines return to themes such as attempts to manipulate election rules from within state governments, disputes over who gets to administer elections, and the use of litigation as a tool to undermine or defend democratic outcomes. In these stories, he follows the chain from a legal complaint or administrative decision to its real-world impact on voters and on the mechanics of elections. Rather than treating election law as an abstract specialty, he frames it as a series of concrete interventions that can disenfranchise specific groups, entrench partisan control, or shore up protections for future contests.
Abuse of power and institutional checks
Rashid often reports on efforts to hold high-profile political figures and their allies to account through formal processes. The Trump era and its aftermath are a constant backdrop in his work, but his interest lies less in personalities and more in the systems that either restrain or enable them. He covers investigations, ethics complaints, and oversight efforts that test the limits of executive privilege, legislative authority, and judicial oversight. His pieces tend to connect individual skirmishes — a blocked attempt to destroy records, a challenge to an election official’s decision, a new lawsuit over political interference — to broader questions about whether existing checks on power are functioning as designed. This emphasis on institutional design and stress-testing distinguishes his coverage from more conventional political horse-race reporting.
Explanatory reporting on complex legal-politics intersections
Across his politics beat, Rashid’s stories are structured to help readers navigate complicated intersections of law and politics without assuming prior legal expertise. He writes in plain language about motions, orders, and statutory requirements while retaining the specificity of case names, jurisdictions, and procedural posture. His articles often begin from a clear news hook — a new ruling, an emergency filing, or a shift in legal strategy — and then broaden out to show how that moment fits into a longer sequence of legal and political maneuvers. He favors reported, explanatory pieces over personality profiles or campaign-trail color, and he treats legal documents, official communications, and public records as core reporting material. The through-line is an insistence that democracy is administered on paper and in courtrooms as much as at rallies, and that tracking those venues is essential to understanding contemporary American politics.
4 more politics journalists.
Adam Daly
Adam Daly covers politics for amNewYork with a focus on the inner workings of city and state government and the low-profile forums where power is exercised and negotiated. He reports on commissions and panels that shape how New York is governed, treating charter reform and government efficiency as central political terrain. His coverage of moves to replace an Adams-era charter commission with a new government efficiency panel foregrounds mandate, authority, and what “efficiency” means in practice for agencies and services. He tracks who gains and loses influence when one commission supplants another and which constituencies are being answered to. Daly explains dense procedural questions in clear, reader-facing terms, using specific institutional details and occasional wordplay to connect jargon-heavy reforms to public spending, service delivery, and mayoral power.
Alex Swoyer
Alex Swoyer covers national politics through the lens of the law, treating court cases and filings as core political documents rather than a separate legal niche. She reports for the Washington Times on the Supreme Court, federal courts and the justice system’s intersection with campaigns, Congress and the presidency. Her coverage follows political disputes as they move into courtrooms, focusing on cases that affect elections, executive power, immigration, religious liberty and gun rights. She explains opinions, dissents and procedural moves in plain language, grounding stories in briefs, oral arguments, orders and government records, then pairing them with reaction from officials, strategists and advocacy groups. She also reports on election rules, January 6 prosecutions, politically sensitive investigations, Republican Party dynamics and campaign‑trail narratives, using straight news, explainers and roundups to show how law, institutions and political ambition meet.
Alexander Mallin
Alexander Mallin stands out for turning dense Justice Department and federal court actions into clear, step-by-step reporting for ABC News. He covers politics through law enforcement and the courts, with a core beat on special counsel investigations, federal prosecutions, and clashes between the executive branch, Congress, and federal prosecutors. His reporting tracks interview transcripts, subpoena fights, indictments, plea deals, trial outcomes, and other court filings, especially in cases tied to President Joe Biden, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and other high-profile political conflicts. He also covers transparency fights over investigative records and explains the statutes, rules, and institutional mechanics behind grand juries, redactions, and special counsel appointments. His stories are document-heavy, restrained, and focused on what prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges are doing on the record.
Allie Kelly
Allie Kelly is a politics reporter at Business Insider who treats US politics as a story about personalities, performance, and the internet. She covers the intersection of political figures, online culture, and how power is exercised in public. Her work follows elected officials and rising players across parties, focusing on how they brand themselves, test messages, and respond to scrutiny. She often writes about memes, viral moments, and tools like meme coins as real campaign tactics and communication strategies. Her reporting explains how digital culture shapes electoral politics, party tensions, and governance. She favors short, accessible pieces built around vivid examples, like a lawmaker launching a DOGE-style coin, to explain broader trends. She uses clear, plain language, grounding each story in who holds power, what they are doing, and why their online choices matter.