Susan Schmidt has worked for The Washington Post since 1983. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Mary Baldwin College in 1975 and then landed a job as a news assistant at the Washington Star. She went on to reporting jobs at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Quincy Mass. Patriot Ledger. After joining The Washington Post, she worked as an editor in various capacities on the metro desk and then joined the business news staff as a reporter covering the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry Schmidt joined the national news staff in 1992. She covered Whitewater and other independent counsel investigations and wrote the first story about the Monica Lewinsky investigation. She and a co-author, Michael Weisskopf, published a best selling book in 2000 about the inner workings of that investigation, Truth at Any Cost. Since then, Schmidt has written about terrorism and, most recently, has been detailed to the Post's investigative staff to write about corruption in lobbying.

Schmidt is married to Glen Nishimura, an editor at USA Today. They have two teenage daughters and live in McLean, VA.

James V. Grimaldi is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, where he has worked since 2000. His work in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was part of a staff entry that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service in 2002.

While at the Orange County (CA) Register, he contributed to a staff entry that won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. He has been a Knight-Bagehot business and economics fellow and has journalism degrees from the University of Missouri and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

He has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Press Club, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and other media organizations. He is on the board of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

R. Jeffrey Smith has been a reporter at The Washington Post since 1986. He is a native of Milwaukee and has degrees from Duke University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He worked at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the Des Moines Register and the Milwaukee Journal before joining Science magazine in Washington, where he won a National Magazine Award in 1986 for an article on technology and the arms race. He then joined The Post as a national security correspondent. In 1998, he became the newspaper's Rome bureau chief, covering the Balkans, two wars in Kosovo, a revolution in Serbia and a rebellion in Macedonia.

He is now an investigative reporter on the national news staff.