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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Adelson built a casino empire that stretched from Las Vegas to Singapore. His huge donations to conservative causes in the U.S. and Israel helped shape politics in both countries. -
Koch and his brother Charles built one of the nation's largest private businesses and created a network of secretly funded organizations that attacked Democrats. -
Small donors carried Democrats to victory in 2018 races. Now Republicans, who once had the magic touch with small-dollar givers, are struggling to match Democrats' fundraising platform, ActBlue.
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Republicans hope their new online fundraising platform will close the gap between the GOP and Democrats, even though the digital highway is littered with several previous failed attempts. -
"I have no misgivings," said the head of one group. "On election night 2018, I didn't hear anybody go, 'Oh jeez, we won! But gosh, wasn't all that stuff really bad that helped everybody win?' " -
Democrats point to a 1924 law that allows Congress to request the tax returns of any taxpayer. But Trump and his defenders say the president's returns are private and can't be reviewed by Congress. -
The Texas GOP senator says donors should be able to cover his campaign loans after an election. Anti-corruption advocates warn against a loophole for wealthy contributors to influence lawmakers. -
Rep. Richard Neal, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked the IRS commissioner for six years of President Trump's personal tax returns, as well as returns for some of his businesses.
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Democratic presidential candidates are working to fund their campaigns. But instead of getting that money through large checks and big donors, they're mostly trying to collect it in small donations.
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As one of the emoluments lawsuits against President Trump goes before an appeals court, ethics controversies have become a persistent cloud over the White House, federal agencies and Congress.
