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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This week's congressional hearings on social media, data mining and politics are shaping up as a watershed moment in the touchy relationships between Washington and Silicon Valley.
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Facebook didn't open an office in Washington, DC until it was five years old and already worth billions. Last year, the company spent $12 million lobbying lawmakers and the federal government. -
A federal judge ruled that Maryland and the District of Columbia can sue Trump. The states allege that he wrongly profits when foreign officials do business at the Trump hotel near the White House. -
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." -
The British firm, which worked for President Trump's campaign, gathered data from as many as 50 million Facebook users. Did it break the limits on what foreign nationals can do in U.S. campaigns? -
Cambridge Analytica could face legal problems related to how it harvested and used data of millions of Facebook users.
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The FEC is under pressure after Russian trolls used social media to meddle in the presidential election. -
Republicans have spent more than twice as much on the Pennsylvania race as Democrats. That flood of spending comes even though the district won't exist after this November's election. -
"Not only does unethical behavior spread, but it mutates into other forms of unethical behavior," says ethics consultant Susan Liautaud. -
There's a scandal in the Trump administration. Not the one that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating, but one involving several of Trump's Cabinet officials and their use of taxpayer funds.
