AP hires biz reporter Horwitz for investigative team

The Associated Press has hired business journalist Jeff Horwitz to join its expanding investigative team based out of Washington.

Horwitz is currently on a Knight-Bagehot fellowship at Columbia University. As a reporter for American Banker between 2009 and 2013, he wrote about banks’ legal woes and the fallout from the housing crisis. He documented how shoddy record-keeping and robo-signing pervaded JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s sale of defaulted credit card debts, and exposed how banks profited from the sale of overpriced insurance.

He was a 2012 Loeb Award finalist for stories exposing how banks used insurance to disguise billions of dollars of housing boom-era kickbacks.

Horwitz will join a team, led by news editor Ted Bridis, that also includes reporters Stephen Braun, Dina Cappiello, Jack Gillum and Eileen Sullivan. The Washington team won the 2012 Pulitzer and Goldsmith prizes for investigative reporting on the New York Police Department’s intelligence programs. In May 2012, the team also broke a story about a CIA operation in Yemen to stop an airliner bomb plot by al-Qaida.

That story led to the seizure of AP phone records by the U.S. Department of Justice. Protests against that action eventually led to stronger press protections under new DOJ rules put in place earlier this year.