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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With control of the House, Democrats now can fulfill promises to investigate wrongdoing in the Trump administration, and overhaul political money and ethics laws.
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If Democrats win control of the House, they'll have the power to investigate alleged misconduct of the Trump administration. They have a long list of misdeeds they want to look into.
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Well-made videos can go viral and boost a candidate's popularity, and now they can bring in the cash for a viable campaign.
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When President Trump said the money didn't come from his campaign, he was making the wrong defense. The problem is that it didn't come from the campaign. -
A group of high-profile lobbyists and lawyers who worked for Ukraine's former pro-Russian government maybe under investigation for violating a law requiring lobbyists for foreign governments to register with the U.S. government.
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A federal judge has rejected a motion from the Department of Justice to dismiss the suit. The lawsuit alleges Trump's businesses, especially his hotel in D.C., violate the Constitution. -
Conservatives immediately put up ads supporting the nominee-to-be, while a liberal group aims to make the Supreme Court decision to uphold Obamacare part of the debate. -
After two days of hearings, the Federal Election Commission is a bit closer to ending anonymous funding for online pro- and anti-candidate ads. But that's just one portion of the political ads online.
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At least eight funds now exist to help Trump administration aides and allies pay legal bills. But there are few rules to promote transparency or avoid conflicts of interest.
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Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said the conflict between Trump's foreign-policy decisions and his business ventures "epitomizes why the founders put that emoluments clause into the Constitution."
