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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President Trump named Icahn as an unpaid special adviser on regulatory changes. But no one has defined what a special adviser is, or how much power Trump has given to his longtime rival and friend.
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The compliance forms are to be posted online, along with the ethics agreements the appointees signed during the Senate confirmation process. -
"It all just looks really bad," said anti-corruption expert Stuart Gilman. "It looks like Trump is trying to simply protect his properties." -
A lawyer for United to Protect Democracy says the nonprofit is "protecting the civil service from purges, intimidation or politicization."
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The phrase didn't originate with the Trump campaign. Advocates of tougher laws on political money and lobbying have used it for years. -
Democracy 21 says President Trump's son-in-law should recuse himself from certain duties. Kushner's lawyer says her client "has consistently said that he would follow government ethics requirements." -
"The common understanding in the watchdog community is that we're going to have to hold the Trump administration responsible, because no one else is going to do it," says strategist Fred Wertheimer. -
The Constitution says federal officers can't take emoluments — money — from foreign governments and officials. Two lawmakers question Trump's plan to avoid the constitutional issue at his hotels. -
American Oversight, a watchdog group that includes former Obama administration lawyers, is using the Freedom of Information Act to keep tabs on the Trump administration's agencies. -
Walter Shaub of the Office of Government Ethics, which lacks enforcement power, says the House Oversight Committee does not seem to be matching the surge of concern about the Trump administration.
