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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Reporters asked President Trump if he would fire Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price over expensive taxpayer-funded travel. Trump's reply: "We'll see." -
Shaub, who has had many battles with the Trump administration, says he is quitting to become a legal activist. He says the "current situation" shows tougher ethics action is needed. -
The compliance forms are to be posted online, along with the ethics agreements the appointees signed during the Senate confirmation process. -
In a vision described as "Winning The Global Competition," the GOP nominee is proposing three tax brackets and would limit taxes on all forms of business income as well as end the estate tax. -
When former Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race, a superPAC supporting him was left with millions of dollars in the bank. So where did it go? And what are the rules? -
Barely three years after the Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United ruling freed corporations and unions to spend wildly in elections, the justices decided to take up another campaign finance case — this one aimed at a limit on "hard money" that goes directly to candidates and party committees. -
A "return on investment" is a concept better known to Wall Street than to Washington. But after President Obama and the Democrats won most of the close elections last week, there are questions about the seven- and eight-figure "investments" made by dozens of conservative donors. -
A new analysis of TV ads so far this election cycle finds that 70 percent of the messages have been negative — a trend spearheaded by the heavily financed superPACs supporting the candidates. At this point in the 2008 election, 91 percent of TV ads were positive.
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This week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi suggested she might release details of the 1990s ethics investigation into then-Speaker Newt Gingrich. An investigative committee, on which Pelosi served, concluded that Gingrich had used tax-exempt funds for partisan purposes. -
In his career as governor of Texas, Rick Perry has raised about half his campaign cash from just 204 big donors. One of them, Harold Simmons, has given Perry roughly $3 million of support. And in recent years, Simmons' company has gotten a license to operate a radioactive waste site, despite environmental concerns.
