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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Ninety miles west of the White House, the National Park Service was selling Trump Wine at Shenandoah National Park — raising questions about Park Service rules and presidential influence.
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The Federal Election Commission sets disclosure rules for ads that discuss candidates. Many of the ads in question dealt only with issues.
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"We have dysfunction in Congress; we have dysfunction, I think, in the presidency; and we have dysfunction in the lobbying community" — reform lobbyist Meredith McGehee
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On Wednesday, a federal judge will hear arguments in a case that asks: Is President Trump taking the kind of benefits banned by the Constitution? Step 1 is deciding whether plaintiffs have standing.
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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."
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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Because of his many roles at the White House, President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner draws controversy. Previous presidents hired family members too, but those staffers had political experience.