Andrew Bower: Deputy staff director, House Oversight Committee Democrats

Andrew Bower followed Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) from his personal office to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as Democrats elevated a fresh face, and with him, a fresh new approach to investigations.

The committee has faced an avalanche of issues, but it’s the probe into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that Bower said “has really defined the committee’s arc and vision.”

“There’s so much pressure from the survivor communities to whom we owe so much, and from the American people who are watching all of this, that it’s owed an enormous amount of time and resources, and it deserves it,” Bower, 33, told The Hill.

However, he acknowledged, “Any investigation where we’re going to be deposing former presidents and Cabinet secretaries … has the risk of blocking out the sun.”

As deputy staff director, Bower has been a big part of rethinking the panel’s goals under President Trump and weighing how to balance its broad investigative reach with what might resonate most with the public.

Bower said in some cases, that’s meant a shift to trying to take information already in the public sphere and make it more digestible.

“We can uncover a contract that shouldn’t have been awarded, or a payment. … But in full view, [Trump’s] made $2 billion off of crypto. It is a real balance,” Bower said, adding that the guiding principle is that Americans have a right to know what their government is doing.

“It’s our job to uncover the facts that help them understand what that is. On the other hand, sometimes what we are doing is organizing public facts in a way that the American people can understand — I’m calling attention to lights that are flashing right in front of us.”

The committee credits Bower with being behind a few of its viral moments. Though Bower’s TV preferences skew more toward “The Simpsons” than “The Real Housewives,” knowing his boss was a fan he intertwined a moment from the franchise’s Salt Lake City show into a line of questioning.

He advises newer staffers that they should be “as deeply embedded in Twitter as you can psychologically tolerate, unfortunately.”

“Obviously Twitter is not real life, but lots of members think it’s real life,” he said, adding that it’s important to see what members are looking at as well as discourse on the other side.

Sometimes those fights, he said, are what “drives the House floor and political dynamics … especially in a very narrow minority where very online members can wield an insane amount of power.”