Arthur Ewenczyk is a tax attorney-turned-congressional investigator who has helped Democrats navigate the impeachment probe into President Biden.
Ewenczyk, 36, spent greater than 5 years as a Justice Division prosecutor on tax instances, impressed to tackle one of many wonkiest areas of regulation.
However whereas taking down tax cheats one after the other, Ewenczyk realized he wished to work on fixing underlying issues in coverage.
“I was interested in coming to the Hill to think more broadly about how you can look at issues and solve issues at a broader level than you can when you’re a prosecutor,” he mentioned.
Ewenczyk’s curiosity took him far past tax coverage, touchdown as a substitute on the heart of Congress’s greatest political brawls by way of his perch on the Home Oversight and Accountability Committee.
He joined the panel’s employees throughout Democrats’ battle to safe former President Trump’s taxes, when it was clear that having a background in reviewing monetary data and following cash was an asset.
It’s a ability set that’s confirmed related throughout a variety of investigations, most just lately as Democrats have pushed again in opposition to a GOP-led investigation into Biden household enterprise practices that Republicans have sought to tie to the president.
Ewenczyk mentioned Democrats rapidly realized that the impeachment probe had “serious credibility issues,” and committee rating member Jamie Raskin’s (D-Md.) pledge to be a “Truth Squad” would grow to be a tenet for workers.
However an early listening to through which Republican witnesses mentioned that they had not but seen proof of impeachable crimes shifted the tone, notably as a result of GOP lawmakers had already alleged they’d discover proof of a corruption scheme.
“Strategically that was a huge mistake, because he’s now set up his own goalposts as high as he can possibly set them,” Ewenczyk mentioned of Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Ky.).
“It crystallized the strategy of making sure we were ready whenever they put out new pieces of supposedly hot evidence that we were ready to contextualize it and fact check it right away,” he mentioned.
For Democrats, that meant sustaining a complete understanding of the scattered probe whereas displaying an absence of wrongdoing by Biden.
Ewenczyk mentioned that included being “consistent with the facts.”
“Because at the end of the day, it came back to ‘we’re the truth squad,’ so we needed to make sure that everything we said was accurate.”