Arthur Ewenczyk: Democratic chief counsel, House Oversight and Accountability Committee
Arthur Ewenczyk is a tax attorney-turned-congressional investigator who has helped Democrats navigate the impeachment probe into President Biden.
Ewenczyk, 36, spent more than five years as a Justice Department prosecutor on tax cases, inspired to take on one of the wonkiest areas of law.
But while taking down tax cheats one by one, Ewenczyk realized he wanted to work on fixing underlying problems in policy.
“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 said.
Ewenczyk’s interest took him far beyond tax policy, landing instead at the center of Congress’s biggest political brawls through his perch on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
He joined the panel’s staff during Democrats' battle to secure former President Trump’s taxes, when it was clear that having a background in reviewing financial records and following money was an asset.
It’s a skill set that’s proven relevant across a number of investigations, most recently as Democrats have pushed back against a GOP-led investigation into Biden family business practices that Republicans have sought to tie to the president.
Ewenczyk said Democrats quickly realized that the impeachment probe had “serious credibility issues,” and committee ranking member Jamie Raskin’s (D-Md.) pledge to be a “Truth Squad” would become a guiding principle for staff.
But an early hearing in which Republican witnesses said they had not yet seen evidence of impeachable crimes shifted the tone, particularly because GOP lawmakers had already alleged they would find evidence 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 said 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 said.
For Democrats, that meant maintaining a total understanding of the scattered probe while showing a lack of wrongdoing by Biden.
Ewenczyk said 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.”
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