A contractor allegedly paid $150,000 to Susan Collins's Super PAC and then told his colleagues she had promised him $32 million in federal contracts in return. The FBI was building a case. Then Trump came back to power, purged the agents running it, and gutted the office that investigates politicians. Funny how that works.
What ProPublica Actually Found
ProPublica's investigation, published this week, lays out the arrangement in uncomfortable detail. In the run-up to Collins's 2020 Senate race, the head of her Super PAC allegedly solicited a campaign donation from Navatek, a contracting firm. Navatek CEO Martin Kao wanted something back: assurances that his company would win government business.
Kao then sent $150,000 to the Super PAC through a shell company. After the money moved, according to ProPublica, he told other executives at the firm that Collins would make sure Navatek landed $32 million in federal contracts. That is the allegation. That is the specific, documented allegation sitting in a major investigative report published days before a Senate race that could flip the chamber.
Kao is currently in federal prison, having pleaded guilty to fraud charges. Collins's team has leaned on that fact hard, arguing his account is the word of a convicted fraudster angling for a reduced sentence. That framing is not wrong, exactly. It is also very convenient.
Where the FBI Comes In
Here is where the story gets significantly darker. ProPublica reports that by late 2024, FBI agents were moving toward launching a large-scale political bribery investigation into this arrangement. They were building toward it. And then Donald Trump returned to the White House.
The agents leading the case were pushed out in the broader purge Trump ordered of the FBI after taking office again in January 2025. The Justice Department office that specifically oversees investigations of elected officials was gutted around the same time. The inquiry went nowhere.
To be absolutely precise: we do not know for certain that Trump killed this investigation to protect Collins. What we know is that the investigation was heading somewhere, Trump systematically dismantled the people and institutions running it, and it is now dead. Draw whatever conclusions you like from that sequence of events.
Collins Says It's All False. Her Campaign Says Biden Cleared Her.
Collins's deputy chief of staff Annie Clark called the ProPublica report "categorically false." Her campaign manager Steve Abbott went further, arguing that the Justice Department and FBI under Joe Biden had already looked at these contributions and found no basis to charge anyone.
"In order for that claim to be true, you would have to disbelieve the Biden-led Department of Justice and the Biden-led FBI," Abbott said. It is a real argument. It is worth engaging with seriously. Biden's DOJ had every political incentive to go after a high-profile Republican senator in a competitive state, and apparently did not pull the trigger.
But the Biden DOJ not charging someone is not the same as the FBI not continuing to investigate them. ProPublica is specifically reporting on what was happening in late 2024, in the months after the election, when agents were reportedly still building the case. Those are two different timelines, and Collins's campaign has not cleanly addressed that gap.
The Race Collins Was Already Losing
This story dropped into a Senate race that was already teetering. Collins is the only Republican up for re-election in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024. Political forecasters call it a toss-up. Recent polls, according to The Guardian, show her Democratic opponent Troy Jackson narrowly ahead.
Jackson, a former Maine state senate president, did not waste any time. "This is corruption of the highest order," he said Wednesday. "We deserve answers about every contract and every conversation that Collins and her team facilitated on the backs of taxpayers. The jig is up."
Collins has been in that Senate seat since 1997. She has survived every serious Democratic challenge thrown at her, including 2020, when she beat Sara Gideon by eight points while Biden was carrying Maine. She is not easy to beat. But Lance Dutson, a strategist who worked on her last three campaigns and is not involved this cycle, told The Guardian that Trump's collapsing approval ratings are a serious headwind, and that a corruption story in late September is "definitely not helpful."
Why Maine Matters So Much Right Now
Democrats need to flip at least four Republican-held seats to take back the Senate, which Republicans currently hold 53-47. Maine is the centerpiece of that map because it is the only target that Harris already won. Losing it would require Democrats to run the table almost everywhere else.
The Senate appropriations committee, which Collins chairs, controls federal spending. It is an enormously powerful position, and it is precisely the kind of role that would make Collins valuable to a contractor seeking government contracts. Democrats in Maine have been pointing at that fact for years. The ProPublica report gives that argument a specific dollar figure and a paper trail.
Maine Democratic Party executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson accused Collins Wednesday of selling out her constituents while using her appropriations chairmanship to benefit donors. "We sent Susan Collins to Washington to fight for us. Instead, it appears that she has sold us out yet again and gotten bailed out of trouble by the president of the United States."
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is all a coincidence. The FBI was investigating a senator. Trump took power and fired the agents running it. The office overseeing political corruption cases was dismantled. And now we are told the right response is to shrug and accept that the senator's campaign says she's innocent. Sure.
Maybe Collins is completely clean. Maybe Kao made the whole thing up to shave time off his prison sentence, and the Biden DOJ really did look at this thoroughly and found nothing. Those possibilities exist. But the mechanism that would have tested those possibilities, the FBI investigation itself, was shut down by a president who has spent two years systematically destroying every institutional check on his allies and his party. At some point, you do not get to keep using the absence of accountability as proof of innocence when you are the one dismantling the accountability systems.
Six weeks before a Senate election that could determine the balance of power in Washington, voters in Maine are being asked to decide whether all of this adds up to something or nothing. Collins has survived tighter spots than this. But she has never had to survive one where the cover story requires trusting Donald Trump's Justice Department to be the honest broker.
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