Peter Overby
Peter Overby has covered Washington power, money, and influence since a foresighted NPR editor created the beat in 1994.
Overby has covered scandals involving House Speaker Newt Gingrich, President Bill Clinton, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and others. He tracked the rise of campaign finance regulation as Congress passed campaign finance reform laws, and the rise of deregulation as Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions rolled those laws back.
During President Trump's first year in office, Overby was on a team of NPR journalists covering conflicts of interest sparked by the Trump family business. He did some of the early investigations of dark money, dissecting a money network that influenced a Michigan judicial election in 2013, and — working with the Center for Investigative Reporting — surfacing below-the-radar attack groups in the 2008 presidential election.
In 2009, Overby co-reported Dollar Politics, a multimedia series on lawmakers, lobbyists and money as the Senate debated the Affordable Care Act. The series received an award for excellence from the Capitol Hill-based Radio and Television Correspondents Association. Earlier, he won an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for his coverage of the 2000 elections and 2001 Senate debate on campaign finance reform.
Prior to NPR, Overby was an editor/reporter for Common Cause Magazine, where he shared an Investigative Reporters and Editors award. He worked on daily newspapers for 10 years, and has freelanced for publications ranging from Utne Reader and the Congressional Quarterly Guide To Congress to the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.
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Increasingly, wealthy business people are funding think tanks. As one political scientist notes, they tend to "want to know exactly what they're getting for their dollars' worth." -
Anonymous donations to a legal defense fund, even one for White House staffers, could be a discreet way of showing loyalty to President Trump. -
Ethics watchdogs are preparing for their lawsuit alleging President Trump is violating the Constitution's foreign emoluments clause. But this renews the controversy over what defines an emolument?
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Facebook says $100,000 worth of ads appeared to come from Russia and seemed to be linked. Sometimes the ads named the candidates, but mostly, they targeted divisive social and political issues.
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The word — at the heart of a suit about the Trump D.C. hotel — now seems obscure and technical. It was more common, and had a more general meaning, when the Constitution was drafted, a scholar said. -
The president's re-election campaign will sell you Trump's USA hat in white, red or camouflage for $40. -
While giving reporters his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., the president reminded them he owns a vineyard there. But that presidential product placement was a blip on the radar. -
President Trump and his White House seem to have settled into a routine of dismissing the ethics laws. So when he plugged his Charlottesville winery at a last week, the pitch hardly made headlines.
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Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee want to know if the spending is "in the public interest" or for the financial gain of the president and his family. -
President Trump and some GOP lawmakers want an investigation into Hillary Clinton and other figures from the Obama era. But a probe of a defeated candidate is not the norm in American democracy.
