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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This week's congressional hearings on social media, data mining and politics are shaping up as a watershed moment in the touchy relationships between Washington and Silicon Valley.
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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."
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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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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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The American system of financing campaigns is changing, as post-Watergate reforms crumble beneath a crush of unregulated money.
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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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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 Trump family has been hiring lawyers to defend themselves against various potential charges involving Russian contacts. But who is paying those legal fees?
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When Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer last June, did he break any law? Foreign nationals are barred from providing "anything of value" to campaigns, and candidates are barred from soliciting anything of value.