# Tara Palmeri

Tara Palmeri (born September 1, 1987) is an American journalist and independent content creator on YouTube and Substack where she writes The Red Letter. She was previously the Senior Political Correspondent for subscription news platform Puck. She served as Chief National Correspondent at Politico and host and chief investigative reporter of two Sony Music podcasts: "Broken: Seeking Justice" and "Power: The Maxwells". She previously worked for Washington Examiner and the New York Post and was a White House correspondent for ABC News.

## Personal life

Palmeri was born on September 1, 1987, in New York. Her mother, Yolanda, is an immigrant from Poland. Her father is an electrician. She is a 2005 graduate of DePaul Catholic High School in Wayne, New Jersey. She attended American University and graduated with a bachelor's degree in Public Communication in 2008. She is a Spring 2025 Fellow at the Sine Institute of Politics and Policy at American University, where she graduated summa cum laude.

## Career
### CNN

Palmeri started her career at CNN as a news assistant in the D.C. bureau in 2009.

### Washington Examiner

She subsequently joined the Washington Examiner where she co-wrote a daily column called "Yeas & Nays". She grew its traffic from 25,000 to more than 1 million monthly views.

### New York Post

She moved to New York in 2010 when she was hired by the New York Post to write for Page Six and then moved on to cover City Hall. She also worked as a general assignment reporter and covered stories including the John Edwards trial, the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting, the 2012 Democratic and Republican National conventions and the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide. While at the New York Post, Palmeri broke the news of Chris Christie's weightloss surgery.

### Politico

Politico hired her to cover European politics from Brussels in 2015. Here she covered the terror attacks in Paris and Brussels. After the 2016 presidential election, Politico reassigned her to Washington as a White House reporter covering the Trump administration. During her tenure, she broke exclusive stories, including that an executive order was drafted to remove the US from NAFTA and that numerous White House staffers had failed FBI background checks, which led White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to call Palmeri "an idiot with no real sources."

### CNN

CNN announced in 2017 that Palmeri was hired as a political analyst for the network, while continuing to cover President Trump for Politico.

### ABC News

Palmeri was hired by ABC News as a full-time White House correspondent in October 2017. From ABC News president James Goldston's memo on her hiring: "Tara is a tenacious reporter with a keen instinct for political scoops, and a thoughtful analyst of both politics and policy... Tara joins us at a time when news from Washington continues to dominate the news cycle and impact every aspect of our audience’s lives." At ABC, Palmeri was first to report that the last living Nazi in the US was deported to Germany; that President Trump had approved the sale of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine; and that Trump ordered a plan to remove all US diplomats from Turkey for the return of Pastor Brunson.

### Sony Podcasts

After ABC, she hosted investigative podcasts for Sony about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and the wealthy family of his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell.

### Politico

Palmeri left ABC News and re-joined Politico to work as a co-author of its newsletter Playbook in 2021.
While at Politico, Palmeri's reporting led to a White House official resigning early in the Biden administration. According to Vanity Fair, White House Deputy Press Secretary TJ Ducklo had threatened Palmeri, telling her he would "destroy her" if she published a story about his relationship with Alexi McCammond, an NBC, MSNBC and Axios reporter. Ducklo during a phone call also reportedly made "derogatory and misogynistic comments" towards Palmeri and accused her of being "jealous" of his relationship with McCammond. On February 12, Ducklo was suspended without pay by the White House for one week. The following day, Ducklo resigned from his White House position over the matter.

### Puck

In 2022, Palmeri joined the journalism startup Puck as a partner and senior political columnist. At Puck, Palmeri broke the news that Nancy Pelosi would resign as Speaker of the House after the 2022 midterm elections. Thereshe hosted the election-themed podcast, “Somebody’s Gotta Win,” a collaboration between Puck and Spotify’s The Ringer. This ended in April 2025.

### YouTube

She left Puck, where she reportedly had a salary of $260,000, in March 2025 to move to YouTube to join the partnership program, that offers a grant in exchange for creating original content four times per week.

### Substack

Palmeri has a Substack newsletter called The Red Letter.