With me today on Writers at Work is Andy Kroll, a reporter for ProPublica, the nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Based in Washington, Andy covers justice and the rule of law. Earlier this year, he won the coveted George Polk Award for political reporting for "The Shadow President," a fascinating and comprehensive article about Russ Vought, a conservative, self-described Christian nationalist and longtime Washington bureaucrat who leads the Office of Management and Budget in the current Trump administration.

The OMB is the largest and arguably most powerful office in the executive branch. Under Vought, it's responsible for most of the deep cuts in government agencies and services that have occurred since January 2024. Co-published with The New Yorker, you can find "The Shadow President" on ProPublica's and The New Yorker's websites.

A veteran political reporter whose writing appeared in Mother Jones, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, Andy is also the author of A DEATH ON W STREET: THE MURDER OF SETH RICH AND THE AGE OF CONSPIRACY. You may recall that in 2016, Rich, a young employee of the Democratic National Committee, was murdered in Washington, D.C., shot in the back by an unknown assailant. Soon, however, the Republican-aligned disinformation machine, with the aid of Fox News and other media outlets and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, seized the unsolved murder and spun it into a conspiracy theory involving Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, much to the dismay of the Rich family.

In his book, Andy revealed how the insidious conspiracy campaign came to be and how it eventually unraveled, though not before too many Americans believed it to be true.

There's much to talk about with Andy, who I must tell you I've known socially for a good while now, but I want to focus on the writing of A DEATH ON W STREET: THE MURDER OF SETH RICH AND THE AGE OF CONSPIRACY.