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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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. -
One of Pruitt's closest political allies in Congress said he would call for the EPA chief to step down if his ethical scandals don't stop.
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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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Clinton called campaign finance reform one of the "four big fights" of her campaign. But does this idea of a constitutional amendment to restrict or eliminate big money stand a chance?
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School food service administrators once supported new healthy food requirements on the nation's school lunch program. But now, they want the rules delayed. And they're getting swept up in politics.
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A sales tax on medical devices was passed to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. Manufacturers have been waging a persistent campaign to get rid of it. Now it's one of the bargaining chips being tossed around in the budget crisis on Capitol Hill.
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The pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future received the contribution from Sheldon Adelson. He'd already given the legal limit to Gingrich's campaign, but under the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, and other recent changes in the law, he can give as much as he wants to a SuperPAC like Winning Our Future.
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Until two weeks ago, Norman Hsu was a prodigious fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Since then, he has run from the law and forced the campaign to return all the money he raised. As he built a reputation as a political money man, his background lay hidden.
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The Texas Republican Party abandons its court fight to replace former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on the November ballot. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia rejected the party's request to block an appeals court ruling that says DeLay's name should remain on the ballot.
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In a report released Thursday, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee calls the depth and breadth of misconduct by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and ex-Congressional aide Michael Scanlon, "astonishing."
