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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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. -
There's a scandal in the Trump administration. Not the one that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating, but one involving several of Trump's Cabinet officials and their use of taxpayer funds.
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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.
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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. -
Michael Cohen, a longtime lawyer for President Trump says he paid adult film star Stephanie Clifford, known otherwise as Stormy Daniels, $130,000. The payment happened during the campaign after Clifford alleged she had an affair with Trump.
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Michael Cohen says his payment of $130,000 to Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels, was not a campaign contribution. -
Emory Rounds III is a career civil servant. If confirmed as director of the Office of Government Ethics, he will take charge of an agency under considerable pressure.
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The American system of financing campaigns is changing, as post-Watergate reforms crumble beneath a crush of unregulated money.
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced settlements in two long-running cases against the IRS, saying, "There's no excuse" for the agency's treatment of the groups, which sought tax-exempt status. -
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.
