Like so many others, they hatched their plot at a bar. Meeting on a work trip, Harley Adsit, a congressional staffer, and Sarah Geary, a media manager at Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, found themselves chatting about their media-adjacent jobs over drinks.
As the last rays of daylight faded away, their conversation turned similarly dark: murder.
“We were talking about our mutual love of true crime,” is how Adsit put it a year later, after they released more than a dozen episodes of their “Crime in Congress” podcast.
“We just started to get to thinking about how there are probably so many members that have interesting tidbits about murders in their hometown,” she said.
They created a 30-minute pilot episode of sorts in November, mostly to make sure they really wanted to do the work. They also came up with a logo — a bloody gavel and the podcast’s name set in front of an approximation of the Capitol Rotunda — and built a website. They launched their first episode a few months later and have released an episode or two every month since.
The podcast isn’t for everyone, Geary admitted, but for her, exploring a criminal mind is like visiting a foreign land.
“It’s always trying to fathom how folks end up breaking the law to that extent,” she said. “Like, how do you kill someone?”
While both hosts align on the right politically, they say the podcast is “political, but not partisan,” and you can’t tell from listening where their sympathies lie —other than with the victims of the crimes they discuss.
