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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Even as the presidential public financing system has been all but abandoned, advocates are trying to bring such a system to New York state. What happens there could be a model for other states.
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With little fanfare, President Obama is expected to sign a bill that marks the first legislative step toward undoing the Watergate-era presidential public financing program.
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Organizing for Action, the social welfare group formed out of President Obama's campaign organization, has stumbled over its own fundraising rules. Now it's trying to clean things up.
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Republicans say that to get the measure passed new IRS rules that make it harder for tax-exempt groups to veer into politics must be withdrawn.
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There was a time when secretaries of state were seen as little more than functionaries. That view changed in 2000's Florida presidential election recount, which starred Katherine Harris. Now, secretaries of state are involved in implementing new state laws that have been making it either easier or harder for non-traditional voters to cast ballots — with decidedly partisan implications.
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Four years after the controversial Supreme Court ruling, the meaning of campaign finance reform depends on whom you ask. But those advocating for stronger laws are organizing a long campaign of their own to reduce the political influence of big money.
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The midterm congressional elections are 10 months away. But some political and ideological organizations are already buying ads to criticize incumbents they hope to take down in November, like Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.
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Congress enacted fewer laws this term than any in recent history. That can mean feast or famine for lobbyists; it just depends what they're lobbying for.
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The decision, which reversed a ruling last April by a smaller panel of the court, rejected a TV station's argument invoking the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling of 2010.
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Rumors that a major Obama bundler bankrolled an effort to sink the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Virginia appear to be exaggerated.