Julia Ioffe

In 2009, Ioffe won a Fulbright Scholarship to work in Russia.[13] There, she also became the Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker and Foreign Policy.

From 2011 to 2012, Russian politics experienced a period of massive political unrest, including the largest political protests in the post-Soviet era. Ioffe was reporting on these events. She was the first Western journalist to write a comprehensive profile of Alexey Navalny, then a lawyer and anti-corruption activist. The profile was published in the April 4, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.[14] The profile was a finalist for the Livingston Award.[15] In the next year, Navalny would become the de facto leader of the Russian opposition and major political rival to Vladimir Putin.

Ioffe covered protests, as well as the political maneuvering surrounding Putin's return to the presidency, in her influential column “Kremlinology 2012,” which was published in Foreign Policy.[16]

In February 2012, she continued profiling major Russian politicians for The New Yorker with an article about Mikhail Prokhorov, then the third richest man in Russia who contested the 2012 presidential elections. “Are Putin and Prokhorov running for President against or with each other?” Ioffe asked in the profile.[17] Later, it became known that Prokhorov's candidacy had been inspired by the Kremlin to artificially make the elections look more competitive.[18][19][20]

During the most violent protest, which took place on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin's inauguration, Ioffe took what became an iconic photo of a small boy on a bicycle with training wheels, facing a row of Russian riot police. The image instantly went viral and became one of the symbols of Putin's crackdown on democratic protestors.[21]

At the New Republic, Ioffe wrote about American politics, including about a brewing civil war within the Republican Party.[22] Her 2013 profile of Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul[23] was a finalist for the Livingston Award.[24] She also covered the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.[25] and President Barack Obama's decision not to retaliate against President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons on Syrian rebels.[26]

In 2013, Ioffe wrote about contracting whooping cough, although she had been vaccinated against the disease in childhood.[27] She blamed the anti-vaxxer community for her illness. The New Republic announced that this was the publication's most read article of 2013.

Ioffe continued writing about Russia, including about the 2013 anti-gay laws[28] and the Kremlin's ban on American adoptions of Russian children.[29] In the winter of 2013, Ioffe visited Moscow to document what happened to the opposition after the 2012 crackdown. Among others, she interviewed Alexey Navalny, future presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, and members of Pussy Riot. Her article, “The Loneliness of Vladimir Putin,” appeared on the cover of The New Republic in February 2014.[30]

While covering the 2014 Sochi Olympics for The New Republic,[31][32][33] Ioffe traveled to Ukraine, where pro-Western protestors had toppled the Moscow-friendly president.[34][35][36] She was one of the first Western observers to predict that Russia would invade Eastern Ukraine after its annexation of Crimea.[37] In the spring of 2014, she traveled to Eastern Ukraine to cover the war in Donbass.[38][39][40]

In December 2014, Ioffe was one of the many staff members at The New Republic to resign in protest against owner Chris Hughes's planned changes at the magazine.[41][42] The following month, she joined The New York Times Magazine as a contributor.[43]

In May 2016, Ioffe became a contributing writer at Politico.[44] For the website, she has profiled President Donald Trump’s advisors Stephen Miller,[45] and Carter Page, the latter an investor in Russia and the energy sector.[46]

In December 2016, Ioffe posted a tweet that included obscenely-worded speculation about president-elect Donald Trump being involved in a sexual relationship with his daughter Ivanka. Politico fired her within hours, and she deleted the tweet.[47][48]

The Atlantic announced on December 6 that it was hiring Ioffe to cover national security, foreign policy, and politics, with editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg describing her as "an indefatigable reporter, a gifted analyst, and an elegant writer". Ioffe joined The Atlantic in early 2017.[49]

She wrote about The Atlantic obtaining a 10-month correspondence between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks, which played a pivotal role in the presidential campaign and is suspected of being an agent of Kremlin intelligence. Ioffe wrote that “though Trump Jr. mostly ignored the frequent messages from WikiLeaks, he at times appears to have acted on its requests… and shared that information with Donald Trump’s senior campaign officials”.[50]

Ioffe gained access to the entire e-mail correspondence between Trump's campaign chief Paul Manafort and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with strong ties to the Kremlin. According to the piece: “Manafort (who is in the center of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the possibility of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign) attempted to leverage his leadership role in the Trump campaign to curry favor with a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin”.[51]

In January 2018, The Atlantic published a cover story written by Ioffe entitled “What Putin Really Wants”. In this article, she described Putin's “manipulative genius” as regularly overestimated in the U.S. since the Russian president “is just a gambler who won big”.[52]

In 2017, Ioffe appeared in Frontline PBS documentary "Putin’s Revenge" which was later nominated for an Emmy in two categories: "Best Documentary" and "Outstanding Writing".[55] The documentary was heavily based on an interview with Ioffe. Later, when all the interviews were published on Frontline's YouTube channel, Ioffe's became the most popular and amassed more than two million views.[56]

On August 7, 2013, Ioffe was involved in an argument with Lawrence O'Donnell over Putin's control of Russian media.[57] Ioffe alleged that, instead of letting her answer his questions, O’Donnell “interrupted and harangued and mansplained” her.

The next day, Ioffe responded with a post on The New Republic's website, "Dear Lawrence O'Donnell, Don't Mansplain to Me About Russia", in which she stated that she had spent several years reporting from Russia, was a native speaker, and had been invited and introduced as an expert on Russia. "What bothers me is that, look: your producers take the time to find experts to come on the show, answer your questions, and, hopefully, clarify the issue at hand".[58]

The post quickly drew national attention and started a wide discussion about several aspects of the interaction between television and online media. Joe Coscarelli of New York magazine wrote that "[Ioffe’s] simple, bullet-pointed list of arguments would never be allowed on cable television because they reveal an ability to think outside a black or white, good or bad, America or Russia dichotomy".[59] Philip Bump of The Atlantic assumed that it's "impossible to win a TV Argument in an Internet World", that "the power distinction between host and guest became flexible… (because) they interact both on-air and off" and "nearly any writing online could similarly rise to national attention" like Ioffe's.[60]