Liz Hoffman
Liz Hoffman covers the collision of Wall Street, corporate power, and political decision-making, showing how boardroom choices reverberate through government and public policy debates. At Semafor she focuses on business and finance stories where money, markets, and institutions collide with lawmakers, regulators, and national security concerns.
Wall Street deals with political consequences
Hoffman’s core lens is how high finance translates into political leverage and public fallout. In her reporting on the Pentagon’s effort to draw more private capital into defense projects and the backlash it triggers from Democratic lawmakers, she traces the flow of money across the Pentagon, Wall Street, and emerging defense companies to surface who stands to gain and who is raising alarms. She regularly treats earnings, mergers, restructurings, and major strategic shifts as political events, focusing on implications for workers, communities, and the policymakers who oversee powerful firms.
Her coverage often pairs executives and investors with lawmakers and regulators in the same frame, making clear that corporate strategy is inseparable from the political and policy environment.
Exclusive boardroom and dealmaking coverage
A significant strand of her work is built around boardroom and deal scoop reporting. Hoffman leans on deep sourcing inside banks, investment firms, and large companies to break news on contested transactions, activist campaigns, and leadership shake-ups. She tends to frame these stories through clashes of incentives: directors versus shareholders, private equity sponsors versus creditors, or companies versus the officials scrutinising them.
Rather than treating corporate announcements at face value, she reconstructs the internal debates and negotiations behind them, using documents, term sheets, and conversations with principals to show how decisions were made and what trade-offs were accepted. The result is coverage that feels closer to a post-mortem of a negotiation than a simple recap of a deal.
Policy, regulation, and the business of national security
Hoffman frequently works in the space where business reporting meets national security and industrial policy. She follows how investment flows into sectors like defense technology, energy, and critical infrastructure are shaped by procurement rules, security reviews, and shifting geopolitical priorities. Pieces on the Pentagon’s outreach to investors, for example, sit alongside reporting on how financial institutions respond to sanctions, export controls, or new regulatory pressure.
She often uses individual episodes - a congressional letter, a contentious contract, a regulatory action - as an entry point into larger structural questions about who sets the rules of the economy and which firms become indispensable to the state.
Newsletter analysis and explanatory voice
Across her Semafor work, Hoffman writes in a newsletter-friendly voice that combines scoops with quick, clear analysis.
She explains complex financial structures, funding mechanisms, and corporate tactics in plain language, with an emphasis on what they mean for political actors and the broader public. She tends to highlight incentives, second-order effects, and unintended consequences, situating each story within a wider cycle of boom, crisis, and reform.
Her pieces often move briskly from fresh reporting to informed context, making them useful both as early reads on developing stories and as primers on how particular corners of Wall Street interact with government.
Crisis narratives and the behaviour of powerful institutions
Hoffman also has an established track record chronicling how companies, banks, and policymakers behave under stress, a theme that runs through her coverage of market dislocations and government rescue efforts. She has written long-form work on how major firms and financial actors navigated the economic shock of the early Covid-19 period, and she returns to those episodes when new turmoil hits banks, markets, or corporate balance sheets. In these narratives she is particularly interested in who had power and information at critical moments, how they used it, and what those choices revealed about the unwritten rules that govern the financial system.
4 more politics journalists.
A.D. Quig
A.D. Quig follows money and power through Chicago and Cook County government, showing how political decisions, taxes and public spending affect residents and businesses. At the Chicago Tribune, she covers city and county politics, municipal finance, tax policy, budgets and the structures shaping mayoral and council authority. She joined the Tribune in 2022 after covering politics for Crain’s Chicago Business and The Daily Line. Her work examines council power, ethics rules, police leadership, tax incentives, public agencies and pandemic aid. She has reported on data center tax breaks, property tax errors, federal relief spending and the fiscal effects of major development proposals. Quig combines insider government reporting with public accountability journalism. She uses public records, data and budget documents, follows committees and staff negotiations, and explains complex decisions in plain language with precise numbers and a direct link to everyday consequences.
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.
Adam Pack
Adam Pack covers Capitol Hill through power struggles, investigations and ideological fights, focusing on how Congress intersects with Donald Trump’s agenda. He is a politics writer on Fox News Digital’s Capitol Hill team, covering Congress, federal elections, legislative battles, election rules, war powers, primaries and intraparty fights. He previously wrote for the Daily Caller News Foundation. His reporting examines deadlines, vote counts, bill language, campaign spending, court rulings, oversight reports, culture clashes and emerging issues such as AI-backed political groups. He has covered FISA reauthorization, defense spending, the SAVE America Act, housing policy, redistricting, candidate absences, primary spending and disputes over sex, gender, religion and race-based caucuses. He reports primarily through news features and investigative-style pieces built around documents, committee reports, court records, unearthed video and specific legislative details. He often co-writes complex Capitol Hill stories and publishes “FIRST ON FOX” exclusives.
Adam Sullivan
Adam Sullivan is a veteran politics reporter for WCAX who connects elections and party disputes to everyday life. He covers statewide races, party primaries, federal representation, political rhetoric, extremism, and accountability across the Upper Valley and neighboring states. His reporting includes Becca Balint’s victory over Molly Gray in the Democratic U.S. House primary to replace Congressman Peter Welch. He also reports when political controversies affect public safety, political culture, towns, and institutions, including a New Hampshire Libertarian Party post endorsing violence against elected Democrats. Sullivan follows cultural stories with civic consequences, such as Noah Kahan’s appeal to fans to stop stealing a Strafford road sign linked to his music. He writes straight news centered on concrete events, official reactions, political context, community impact, and what comes next.