CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper joined the network in January 2013. Tapper currently anchors an award-winning two-hour weekday program, The Lead with Jake Tapper, which debuted in March 2013. He has hosted CNN’s Sunday morning show, State of the Union, since June 2015. In April 2021, he became the lead anchor for CNN for Washington, D.C. events.

Tapper imparts his political expertise on State of the Union by conducting interviews with top newsmakers on politics and policy, covering Washington, the country and the world. The Lead, which has won two Emmy awards and been nominated for best live news broadcast, covers headlines from around the country and the globe, the top stories in national and international news, politics, health, money, the environment, sports and popular culture, and concentrates on bringing stories that aren’t found on front pages —buried leads— to the forefront.

Most recently, Tapper played a leading role in the unprecedented 2024 election cycle, moderating CNN’s historic Presidential Debate, an event that changed the course of political history and led to President Biden dropping out of the race. Tapper was at the forefront of the network’s expansive special coverage of the Democratic National Convention, Republican National Convention, and led CNN’s 2024 Election Night in America coverage, providing real-time analysis of key states and exit polls ahead of Donald Trump’s historic victory.

Previously, Tapper extensively covered the 2022 midterm elections and 2020 election, playing a pivotal role in the network’s extended coverage of the race with expert analysis on projections throughout the week-long event. Called “tough and quick” and “a staunch defender of facts in the Trump era” by The New York Times, Tapper has been celebrated for standing up in a nonpartisan way for truth and decency during a period where the U.S. political world has seen shortages of both.

Tapper has been a widely-respected reporter in the nation’s capital for more than 20 years. His reporting on the 2016 election has been recognized with a number of awards, including a 2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, the Los Angeles Press Club’s Presidents Award for Impact on Media, the John F. Hogan Distinguished Service Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association, and The Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Tribute to Exemplary Journalism.

Additionally, in October 2022, Tapper penned The Atlantic’s cover story “This Is Not Justice: A Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment,” advocating for the release of CJ Rice, a Philadelphia teenager wrongfully convicted of attempted homicide in 2013. The piece subsequently led to CJ’s release from prison and stands as one of the most consequential pieces of journalism in Tapper’s career.

Tapper has also moderated many presidential debates for CNN, including the GOP debate at the Reagan Library in 2015, the last Democratic debate of the 2020 cycle between Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, the 2024 Republican primary debate between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, and the presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. He hosts the highly acclaimed CNN Original series United States of Scandal, and has written and hosted numerous documentaries and with subjects including the January 6 insurrection, former Russian hostage and U.S. Marine Trevor Reed, what went wrong in the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and the stories of Medal of Honor recipients Clint Romesha and Ty Carter. He has held world leaders across the aisle to account, including President Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, French President Emanuel Macron, German Chancelor Olaf Schulz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In addition to his reporting, Tapper has also authored six books, including his debut novel The Hellfire Club, published in 2018, its sequel, The Devil May Dance, published in 2021, and the third novel in the series, All The Demons Are Here, published in 2023. His non-fiction works include the best-seller The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, published in 2012, Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency, which was published in 2001, and Body Slam: The Jesse Ventura Story, which was published in 1999. The Outpost debuted in the top 10 on The New York Times best seller list, and Tapper was one of the executive producers of the critically acclaimed film version of The Outpost, directed by Rod Lurie and released in 2020.

Tapper has been active in bringing attention and support for veterans’ issues. Since 2017 he has organized an annual celebrity eBay auction to build specially-designed mortgage-free houses for severely injured veterans of the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan via the top-rated charity Homes for Our Troops, a group for which he serves as an ambassador. In 2018, he was awarded a People’s Choice Vetty during the 3rd Annual Vetty Awards, an annual award ceremony presented by the Academy of United States Veterans. In 2014, Tapper’s book and his reporting on the veterans and troops were cited when the Congressional Medal of Honor Society awarded him the “Tex” McCrary Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Tapper joined CNN from ABC News, where he most recently served as senior White House correspondent, a position he was named to immediately following the 2008 presidential election and where he was awarded the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for outstanding reporting on deadline an unprecedented three times in a row. He also played a key role in ABC News’ Emmy award winning coverage of the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama, and its Murrow-Award winning coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden.

In his more than nine years at ABC News, Tapper covered a wide range of stories, visiting remote corners of Afghanistan, covering the war in Iraq from Baghdad, and spending time in New Orleans to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levee system. In 2008, he served as a lead political reporter for the coverage of the presidential election.

Prior to joining ABC News, Tapper served as Washington correspondent, then national correspondent, for Salon.com. He began his journalism career at the Washington City Paper and his reporting has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The Weekly Standard, among others. He has drawn caricatures and illustrations for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and his comic strip, “Capitol Hell,” appeared in Roll Call from 1994 to 2003. In 2001, he hosted the CNN show Take 5, a weekend program that featured young journalists talking about politics and pop culture.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude from Dartmouth College in 1991 and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, daughter and son.