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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A federal judge ruled that Maryland and the District of Columbia can sue Trump. The states allege that he wrongly profits when foreign officials do business at the Trump hotel near the White House. -
One linguistics expert said referring to "optics" was a way to offer a non-apology along the lines of "I'm sorry you were offended." -
The British firm, which worked for President Trump's campaign, gathered data from as many as 50 million Facebook users. Did it break the limits on what foreign nationals can do in U.S. campaigns? -
The FEC is under pressure after Russian trolls used social media to meddle in the presidential election. -
Republicans have spent more than twice as much on the Pennsylvania race as Democrats. That flood of spending comes even though the district won't exist after this November's election. -
"Not only does unethical behavior spread, but it mutates into other forms of unethical behavior," says ethics consultant Susan Liautaud. -
Conway, who was Trump's campaign manager, advocated for Republican Roy Moore in Alabama's recent Senate election during live television interviews broadcast from the White House lawn. -
The site, ActBlue, raised a record $522.7 million for Democrats in 2017. By comparison, President Trump's campaign took in $350.7 million over two years for the 2016 election. -
Act Blue is a non-profit that has become a start of Democratic fundraising. The digital fundraising platform for progressive candidates and causes raised $522 million in 2017 — that's more than double its take in 2015.
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The 2017 inaugural committee raised nearly $107 million, double what the first Obama inaugural committee brought in. — and managed to spend almost all of it.
