FBI Bribery Probe Tied to a Susan Collins Super PAC Was Dropped After Trump Took Office, ProPublica Reports

A Hawaii defense contractor's CEO told the FBI he ran a pay-to-play operation touching dozens of members of Congress. The bureau's investigation into that claim stalled after President Trump's Justice Department took over in 2025, according to a ProPublica investigation published Tuesday.

The story centers on Navatek, a defense contractor now known as Martin Defense Group, and its former CEO Martin Kao. In late 2019, according to ProPublica, Scott Reed, then head of the pro-Collins super PAC, met three Navatek executives at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. Collins had helped the company land a Navy research contract in Maine a year earlier. Reed asked for a $500,000 donation.

Federal contractors are barred from making political contributions outright. Trading a contribution for an official act is criminal bribery on both ends. ProPublica reports Kao proposed funneling the money through a shell company to hide its source, and that Reed confirmed Collins would still know where it came from and that Navatek would get its contracts.

Kao sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC through the shell company after that meeting, according to ProPublica. Two months later, per an internal company email the outlet reviewed, Kao told Navatek executives that Collins had committed to steering the company $32 million in naval contracts.

From Indictment to Cooperation

The FBI eventually unwound Kao's shell-company arrangement. A grand jury indicted him in 2022 for illegal campaign contributions, and he later pleaded guilty, according to the Bangor Daily News, which also notes Kao separately faced COVID-relief fraud charges. No one working for Collins was charged.

Facing years in prison, Kao spent three days at the U.S. attorney's office in Honolulu laying out what he said was a much bigger operation, according to ProPublica. He handed agents a 50-page document naming lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress he claimed helped trade cash for contracts, and said he and his associates had donated roughly $900,000 across dozens of politicians. None of that broader bribery network has resulted in charges against any lawmaker or staffer, and Kao's claims remain unproven allegations from a defendant who was trying to reduce his own sentence.

ProPublica reports that the wider anti-corruption investigation did not survive the transition to Trump's second term. The outlet says Trump's FBI effectively pulled apart the anti-corruption teams working the case in 2025, and the probe into bribery of lawmakers did not continue.

Collins' Office Pushes Back Hard

Annie Clark, Collins' deputy chief of staff, disputed the story point by point, according to the Bangor Daily News. She called the "seven-year-old allegations" against Collins and her staff "categorically false" and said the campaign wasn't party to whatever discussions Kao had with the super PAC. Clark said claims that Collins' office required donations before meetings, or that Collins engaged in "extortion, pay for play, and bribery," were false, and said the FBI hasn't contacted Collins' team about Kao since 2021.

Clark also argued that the FBI and the Biden Justice Department already examined the Navatek matter thoroughly and found nothing to charge Collins' office with. The investigation that produced Kao's indictment ran under Biden's DOJ, not Trump's. It's the broader multi-lawmaker bribery thread, not the Kao prosecution itself, that ProPublica says went cold after 2025.

The Political Timing

The story landed two months before Collins faces Democrat Troy Jackson, a state senator, in a race widely viewed as one of the most competitive and expensive in the country. Jackson called the allegations "corruption of the highest order" and said Trump "helped her cover it up," per Common Dreams and the Bangor Daily News. He tied the claim to broader attacks on Collins over healthcare and immigration enforcement, arguing voters "deserve answers about every contract and every conversation."

The Bangor Daily News notes this isn't the first attempt to make corruption allegations stick to Collins. Former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, who ran against Jackson in this cycle's Democratic primary before dropping out, raised similar attacks without much traction with voters.

A Broader Pattern at DOJ?

The dropped Navatek thread sits awkwardly next to the Trump administration's own messaging on fraud enforcement. Fox News reported that the FBI recently launched a "Most Wanted Fraudsters" list targeting foreign nationals accused of ripping off federal programs, including Turkish national Onur Simsek, accused of falsely certifying military parts, with a $150,000 reward for his capture. GSA Administrator Ed Forst said the effort would "identify and hold accountable those who try to cheat the federal marketplace and steal from the American people." Whether that same energy applies to a domestic bribery network implicating sitting lawmakers is the question ProPublica's reporting leaves open.

Separately, the conservative watchdog group Oversight Project raised its own DOJ double-standard complaint this month, releasing photos it says show FBI agents handled classified documents found at Joe Biden's home more carefully than they handled the Mar-a-Lago search, according to the Daily Signal. That's a different case entirely, but it reflects a wider argument, from both directions, that federal law enforcement treats politically connected subjects inconsistently.

No charges have been filed against Collins, her staff, or any other member of Congress named in Kao's document. Whether the Justice Department reopens the broader inquiry, and whether Kao's 50-page list ever becomes public, remain open questions as Maine voters head toward a November election that could turn on exactly this story.