Jeff Zeleny

Jeff Zeleny serves as CNN's chief national affairs correspondent. Prior to taking on that role in January 2021, he served as senior Washington correspondent, covering the overall 2020 campaign, as well as the network's senior White House correspondent, covering the Trump administration with a focus on President Trump's pivotal role in the 2018 midterm election campaign for all of the network's programs and platforms. Biden is the fourth consecutive presidency Zeleny has covered, traveling across the country and around the world with George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Zeleny covered the 2016 campaign, his fifth presidential election, from the early days of the Democratic and Republican primaries through the general election contest with Trump and Hillary Clinton. In 2015, Zeleny joined CNN from ABC News where he was their senior Washington correspondent. He reported extensively on the Obama administration and the Republican Party as it gained control of the U.S. Senate in the 2014 midterm elections. Prior to ABC News, Zeleny was the national political correspondent for The New York Times. He covered the 2012 presidential election and Obama's 2008 campaign to the White House. Zeleny also covered the first two years of the Obama administration as a White House correspondent, and previously covered Congress for the Times. Before The New York Times, Zeleny was the national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune where he covered the 2004 presidential campaign and the first term of the Bush administration. He joined the Tribune in 2000 as a reporter on the Metropolitan desk in Chicago, where he was a member of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for documenting gridlock in the nation's air traffic system. Zeleny, a graduate of the University of Nebraska, began his journalism career at the Des Moines Register and is a native of Exeter, Nebraska.