Additions to AP’s Washington investigations team

Washington investigations is a priority coverage area for the AP and a place where we want to increase our competitiveness and break more news. This is also an area where we see high interest from both our customers and audience on APNews. To that end, we are excited to announce that three extraordinary journalists are joining the Washington Investigations team in the next few weeks.

Kimberly Kindy comes our way via The Washington Post, where she spent 15 years writing enterprise and investigative stories.Kindy was a lead reporter on the paper’s “Fatal Force” series in 2015 that examined police shootings that won a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award. In awarding Kindy and the Post staff its prize for national reporting, the Pulitzer board said the series was a “revelatory initiative in creating and using a national database to illustrate how often and why the police shoot to kill and who the victims are most likely to be.” Kindy has also executed investigations on congressional conflicts of interest and was a lead reporter on a series that in 2021 won a Gerald Loeb Award, which included stories about the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine worker safety during the pandemic.A California native and graduate of California State University, Northridge, Kindy has also worked at the San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Daily News. 

Many of you already know Brian Slodysko, who has been breaking stories at AP since 2015.Most recently, Slodysko co-authored an investigation into how Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor used her staff to push sales of her books. He also detailed how the leaders of Turning Point, a conservative youth group, leveraged their ties to Trump to fail upward and become multi-millionaires. Since joining the Washington bureau in 2019, Slodysko has covered campaign finance, Congress and national politics.Slodysko -- a graduate of Whatcom Community College and the University of Washington -- started at AP as a temp in 2009, reporting on the Washington state Legislature. He next worked at the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times before rejoining AP as a statehouse reporter in Louisiana and later Indiana. He was named the Indiana journalist of the year in 2017 by The Society of Professional Journalists, and he has received the Dale W. Burgess Award from The Associated Press Managing Editors Association. 

Byron Tau is joining us from NOTUS. Tau has spent the last 14 years generating scoops in Washington on a range of issues for Politico, The Wall Street Journal and NOTUS. This year, Tau published his first book, “Means of Control,” that examines how governments and corporations are using data brokers to surveil Americans. The book is on the short list of finalists for the being the year’s best book of business reporting by Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.Among Tau’s scoops were stories about federal agencies using cellphone data for immigration enforcement; U.S. spy agencies purchasing private data to conduct warrantless surveillance; the Justice Department’s watchdog launching an investigation of James Comey’s handling of classified information; and Congress starting a probe of the FBI’s decision to rely on a former British spy in to justify surveillance of a former Trump campaign advisorTau has twice won the SPJ Dateline Award for Investigative Journalism, and in 2021 he received the National Press Club’s Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism.A graduate of McGill University, Tau is an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University, where he also received a master’s degree in journalismAll three will start in the weeks after the election.