How Does Congress Build an Investigation Against a Company?
By: Brian D. Nieves, Jonathan L. Fahey, and Steven LaRussa
What Executives Should Know
- Committee staff may spend months building the record before a public hearing so the questions executives eventually face often reflect extensive preparation.
- Every production can teach investigators who was involved, how decisions were made, and where to look next.
- Interviews with employees closer to the facts can shape the questions later posed to senior executives.
- Companies that maintain their own chronology and track what they have told Congress are better positioned to identify problems before they surface publicly.
A congressional hearing is often where an investigation becomes visible. By then, committee staff may have spent months reviewing documents, interviewing employees, and reconstructing the events at issue. Investigators may already have identified the records they consider important and the factual questions they believe remain unanswered. The questions eventually asked in public can be the product of a record developed long before the witness takes the stand.
This matters for companies responding to Congress because an investigation develops as information comes in. Staff may begin with one concern and discover through documents or testimony that the facts lead somewhere else. . The first committee letter can explain why an investigation started without necessarily defining where it will end. A company that understands how staff develops the record is better positioned to anticipate the direction of the investigation.
What Is Congressional Staff Learning from the Company’s Documents?
Committee investigators use document productions to answer the questions that prompted the request, but the records can also teach them how the company operates. Internal communications may show who participated in a decision, how an issue moved through the organization, or which employees became involved as a problem was elevated. The production also introduces investigators to the company’s internal terminology and the people who repeatedly appear in the relevant communications. That information can make the committee’s later requests more targeted.
An early production may show, for example, that a matter described as a business decision was repeatedly discussed with a senior executive. That executive may then become a potential custodian or witness. Staff may also discover an internal name for a project that did not appear in the original request or learn from a meeting invitation that additional employees were involved. The committee knows more about the company after reviewing the production than it did when the original letter was drafted.
Counsel should therefore review documents with an eye toward more than technical responsiveness. A record that seems unremarkable standing alone may take on greater significance when read alongside other material that has already been produced. Understanding which employees repeatedly appear, where the chronology is incomplete, and what questions the documents are likely to generate can help the company anticipate the committee’s next move. The committee will be asking where the documents lead, and the company should be doing the same by identifying which people, events, or unanswered questions are likely to drive the committee’s next request.
Why Does the Chronology Matter So Much?
Much of the investigative work comes down to reconstructing what happened and in what order. That task is harder than it sounds because the materials committee staff receives usually do not tell the entire story. Emails often capture only fragments of conversations; witnesses can sometimes remember the same event differently; and calendars may establish that a meeting occurred but say nothing about what happened in the room. Committee staff therefore must bring those pieces together in sequence before identifying which gaps deserve additional attention. A working chronology often becomes one of the principal ways investigators organize their record.
The Senate Select Committee on Ethics’ investigation of Senator John Ensign provides a useful public example of how congressional investigators can use a chronology to organize and advance an inquiry. In that matter, Committee staff and special counsel reviewed key documents together with deposition transcripts, exhibits, and interview memoranda, and incorporated information from those sources into an evolving chronology. Staff then conducted additional searches as it prepared for later depositions. The investigation ultimately involved more than half a million documents and 72 witness interviews and depositions. The example shows how a working chronology can do more than organize information. It can inform additional searches and preparation for later witness testimony.
Once the events are placed in sequence, questions that were difficult to see in isolation can become obvious. If management learned of a problem on Monday but did not act until Friday, investigators may focus on what happened during the intervening days. If a witness’s recollection of a meeting differs from contemporaneous communications, the chronology puts those accounts next to one another and makes the discrepancy easier to examine. That gap can then lead to another document request, a new witness, or a more pointed line of questioning.
Companies should be doing similar work while the investigation is underway. The company’s own chronology can help identify missing facts and competing accounts before committee staff raises them in an interview or deposition. It can also help counsel understand whether a new production changes the significance of information that was produced earlier. Waiting until a hearing is scheduled to reconstruct the relevant events can leave committee staff considerably further ahead in understanding the record.
How Does Congress Decide Who to Interview?
The CEO may ultimately be the witness who attracts the most public attention, but seniority does not necessarily make someone the most useful witness at the beginning of an investigation. Committee staff may first want to speak with employees who were directly involved and can explain how a decision was made, how the ordinary process worked, and who else participated. Those interviews can fill gaps in the documents and give investigators a better understanding of the organization before they approach senior leadership.
Witness sequencing often make later interviews more productive. Information obtained from one employee can sharpen the questions put to the next, particularly where the witnesses participated in the same events or had different roles in a decision. By the time investigators reach the senior executive, they may have already heard several firsthand accounts and identified the areas where those accounts diverge. The executive may be entering an investigation far more developed than the interview request itself suggests.
The House investigation of ActBlue illustrates how an inquiry can develop through successive stages. There, House committees initially sought documents and transcribed interviews, later subpoenaed current and former employees, and continued gathering information through additional document requests and depositions. Most recently, in September 2026, the House committees issued a third interim staff report based on additional materials obtained during the investigation and released transcripts from depositions of ActBlue board members. The sequence illustrates how information developed at one stage of an investigation can generate new requests, new witnesses, and new lines of inquiry.
The significance for companies is not that every investigation will follow the same sequence, but that a request to interview an employee who appears relatively removed from senior leadership may still be an important investigative development. Counsel should understand what that person knows and consider why staff is seeking that specific testimony at that stage. The answer may help predict which witness or issue comes next.
What Happens During a Congressional Staff Interview or Deposition?
While a public hearing usually gives members limited time to question witnesses, a staff-led interview or deposition can give committee lawyers hours to work through the facts. Investigators can move methodically through the chronology and use documents to establish how the organization normally operated before turning to the conduct under review. Early questions may concern reporting relationships, approval processes, or the circumstances surrounding a particular meeting or communication. Those seemingly routine subjects can establish the factual foundation for more pointed questioning later.
Once a witness explains how a process normally worked, investigators can explore why it appears to have operated differently on a particular occasion. If the witness confirms receiving an email, staff can turn from establishing the record to asking what the communication meant and what happened afterward. The format also allows investigators to revisit an answer after introducing additional documents or testimony. This type of sustained questioning is difficult to replicate in the short rounds available to members at a public hearing.
Staff will compare each interview against the rest of the investigative record. One witness’s account can be measured against another’s, and both can be compared with contemporaneous documents. A representation made to committee staff months earlier can take on new significance after additional information is produced. Differences between those accounts may have innocent explanations, but an unexplained inconsistency gives investigators another factual issue to pursue.
This dynamic becomes particularly important when senior executives testify later in the investigation. An executive may expect broad questions about company policy while investigators already possess detailed testimony concerning specific meetings or conversations. That is why preparation for later witnesses depends heavily on understanding what the committee has already learned.
How Does an Investigation Become a Congressional Hearing?
By the time a matter reaches a public hearing, staff compresses what may be months of work into something members can use effectively. The committee cannot put an entire investigative file on the dais, so staff typically identifies the documents and factual disputes that best illustrate the issues it wants to raise. A lengthy email chain may be reduced to a short excerpt, while a complicated sequence of events may become a few dates in a member’s briefing materials. Earlier testimony may supply the factual premise for a question without ever being quoted publicly.
Staff will also prepare for how it expects the witness to answer. If an executive says senior management was unaware of an issue, investigators may have a document that bears directly on that point. If responsibility is assigned elsewhere in the company, prior testimony may provide the basis for the follow-up. Some of the most effective hearing questions are short precisely because the investigative work behind them has already established the premise.
For the company, that means hearing preparation should begin with the record rather than simply with anticipated messaging. The witness needs to understand what the company has produced, what other witnesses have said, and where staff appears to believe the factual disputes lie. Representations made during earlier briefings can matter just as much as formal testimony if investigators later obtain information that appears inconsistent with them. A polished answer at the hearing cannot substitute for command of the underlying facts.
What Should the Company Be Doing While Congress Builds Its Investigation?
Counsel should develop its own understanding of the investigative record in parallel with committee staff. That generally means maintaining a working chronology, knowing which employees repeatedly appear in the relevant material, and tracking substantive representations previously made to committee staff. Each new production should be considered in the context of what has already been provided rather than treated as an independent response to the latest request.
The purpose is to identify issues before they surface during congressional questioning. If a new production places an employee in the middle of events when that person had previously appeared peripheral, counsel can anticipate that staff may seek an interview. An unexplained period in the larger chronology can be investigated internally before a witness is asked to account for it. Documents that appear inconsistent can be examined to determine whether additional context explains the difference.
This work is not about developing a uniform script for witnesses, but ensuring company fully understands its own record at least as well as the investigators examining it. Learning about a significant factual problem for the first time when a committee lawyer places a document in front of a witness is rarely a good position to be in.
The same principle applies before a committee ever reaches out. Companies operating in areas drawing sustained attention from Congress, regulators, or state attorneys general should consider targeted reviews of issues most likely to attract scrutiny. Those reviews can help identify compliance gaps or inconsistencies between internal practices and public statements before they become part of an investigation. Where appropriate, they should be structured with counsel so that legal and privilege considerations are addressed from the outset.
The response team should ultimately be trying to anticipate the committee’s next question. That becomes harder once investigators have settled on their view of the facts, drafted a report, or begun structuring a hearing around the record they have developed. Understanding how the investigation is being built gives the company a better opportunity to address misunderstandings while the facts are still being developed and before the matter reaches the public stage.
How Can Holtzman Vogel Help with a Congressional Investigation?
Holtzman Vogel advises companies, organizations, and individuals throughout congressional investigations, from initial information requests through interviews, depositions, compulsory process, and public hearings. Our attorneys help clients be proactive during investigations by understanding how committee staff are developing the investigative record, managing productions with later stages of the inquiry in mind, and preparing witnesses based on the information already before Congress. The objective is to understand where the investigation is headed before the next request makes that clear.
