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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IRS commissioner John Koskinen appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee. He tells lawmakers how emails that possibly reveal scrutiny given to Tea Party groups vanished from IRS computers.
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House Republicans are demanding to know what happened to missing emails belonging to Lois Lerner, the IRS official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting controversy.
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A group of 11 theologians has offered up a faith-based analysis of money's role in politics, pitting voices of the pulpit against the courtroom. -
Political action committees poured cash into the House majority leader's campaign, posting big contributions in the final days of the race. Tea Party-backed challenger David Brat was all but ignored. -
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. -
Tom Steyer, a California investor, is aiming to label Republican candidates as "science deniers" who are on the wrong side of the climate change issue. -
According to an analysis of Affordable Care Act advertising, an unprecedented amount of money was spent on negative ads attacking the law. And very little was spent defending it. -
Congress held its first hearing on "dark money," the donations to tax-exempt political groups that can keep donors' names secret. The star witness at the Senate committee was former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, a vocal critic of the rulings that opened the door for the secret spending.
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Topping the list of the former GOP presidential candidate's creditors is an air charter company called Moby Dick Airways. The second biggest creditor? Newt Gingrich himself. -
House Republicans want former IRS official Lois Lerner prosecuted for allegedly revealing information about one of their most powerful outside groups, Crossroads GPS.
