The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington

Donald Trump decries the proverbial Washington swamp. Congress does next to nothing. The band plays on: lobbying remains big business. In 2023, the industry hit a $4.3bn payday. This year shows no end in sight to the trend. As the US gallops toward another election, The Wolves of K Street befits the season.

Brody Mullins, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins, a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.

Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.

“This is a book about men – for they were almost exclusively men – who built K Street,” Brody and Luke Mullins write.

They have produced a tightly stitched, 600-plus-page tome that begins as a true-crime story. The suicide of Evan Morris, a lobbyist for big pharma, takes center stage. In the opening scene of the book, at a posh Virginia golf club on a balmy evening in July 2015, Morris, 38, turns a gun on himself.

The seemingly almost idyllic backdrop to his death is actually a tableau of excess, complete with $150,000 initiation fees, an abandoned Porsche, an emptied bottle of $1,500 bordeaux and a scenic sunset.

Millions of corporate dollars were missing and untaxed. An anonymous letter and an FBI investigation helped ignite Morris’s untimely and violent end.

“The allegations would touch off a years-long case,” the brothers Mullins write.

Morris’s wife and estate settled with Genentech, his employer, the Internal Revenue Service and the commonwealth of Virginia. The government never