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."
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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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President Trump and his White House seem to have settled into a routine of dismissing the ethics laws. So when he plugged his Charlottesville winery at a last week, the pitch hardly made headlines.
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The Trump re-election campaign paid consultant Mark Serrano $30,000 in April and May while he was also defending the president as a Fox Business news commentator.
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Bedminster, the New Jersey town that President Trump often visits, has been designated an official presidential residence and will receive $41 million in federal funds to help cover security costs.
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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.
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As a presidential candidate last year, Trump had to disclose his sources of revenues. Now in office, the president has voluntarily updated the information about the Trump Organization's businesses.
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The White House released a list of people who received exemptions under the ethics rules. The list includes chief of staff Reince Priebus, counselor Kellyanne Conway and chief strategist Steve Bannon.
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President Trump named Icahn as an unpaid special adviser on regulatory changes. But no one has defined what a special adviser is, or how much power Trump has given to his longtime rival and friend.