Susan Collins Corruption & Ethics Maine

Susan Collins's Husband Took Fees From the Firm Where Scott Reed Was Lobbying for a Data Center Billionaire Who Donates to Collins

Collins's own disclosure shows her husband took consulting fees from Chesapeake Enterprises in 2025. That year its only lobbyist, Scott Reed — the man at the center of the Navatek pay-to-play story and head of the super PAC backing Collins — was paid $110,000 to lobby Congress for Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood, a data center developer. Perot gave Collins $7,000 in September 2025.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 01, 2026

Susan Collins's Husband Took Fees From the Firm Where Scott Reed Was Lobbying for a Data Center Billionaire Who Donates to Collins — Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo, via American Journal News

Susan Collins is already defending herself against one story about Scott Reed. Now there is a second one, and this one runs through her own household.

Collins's personal financial disclosure, filed in May, shows that her husband, Thomas Daffron, was paid consulting fees last year by Chesapeake Enterprises, a Washington lobbying shop, according to American Journal News. Senate rules only require a senator to report that a spouse earned more than $1,000 from a source, not the exact amount, so we don't know how much he was paid.

Scott Reed was Chesapeake Enterprises' only registered lobbyist. Reed is the man at the center of the alleged pay-to-play scheme that ProPublica reported on September 22. He also runs Pine Tree Results, the super PAC spending to re-elect Collins.

Who Chesapeake was lobbying for

Federal lobbying records show exactly what Chesapeake was doing in 2025. It had one registered lobbyist, Scott Reed, and four clients. One of them was Hillwood Investments, the Texas real estate company chaired by billionaire Ross Perot Jr.

Hillwood paid Chesapeake $110,000 to lobby the House and Senate on "Real Estate Investments" in 2025: $30,000 in each of the first, second and third quarters, and $20,000 in the fourth. Every one of those reports lists Reed as the only lobbyist on the account.

Hillwood is a major data center developer. Its AllianceTexas development north of Fort Worth is where Facebook built a $1 billion data center, and the company has talked openly about gearing up for the AI data center boom. American Journal News counts at least six data centers now operating in the U.S. that Hillwood helped build.

Daffron is not a stranger to the firm. He was Chesapeake Enterprises' executive vice president from 2001 to 2004, according to American Journal News.

And Perot gives to Collins

Ross Perot Jr. is also a Collins donor. Federal Election Commission records show he gave $7,000 on September 26, 2025 through Collins's joint fundraising committee, all of which went to her campaign as two maximum contributions, while his company was paying Reed to lobby Congress. He gave her $5,600 in December 2019 as well.

So, in one year: a billionaire's data center company pays Scott Reed to lobby Congress. The billionaire maxes out to Susan Collins. Reed runs the super PAC working to re-elect Collins. And Reed's firm pays Collins's husband.

None of this is illegal on its face. It is exactly the kind of tangle the Senate's disclosure rules exist to expose.

The Reed story she's already denying

The reason this matters is the first Scott Reed story.

The FBI looked into a large donation Reed solicited in 2019 from Navatek, a Hawaii defense contractor. Navatek's former CEO, Martin Kao, who is now in prison for wire fraud, told investigators he gave the money understanding that Collins would help his company win millions in federal contracts, which she did. The investigation was dropped shortly after Trump returned to the White House. We laid out the whole Navatek story here.

Collins has questioned ProPublica's reporting and denied any scheme existed. She has also publicly defended Reed. ProPublica stood by its story.

Now it turns out the firm Reed lobbied through was also paying her husband.

Why the data center part stings

Data centers are one of the hottest issues in this election because they drive up electric bills. A New York Times/Siena poll found 61% of Americans oppose building them in their communities, and several Maine towns have passed moratoriums on new ones, American Journal News reported.

Collins has tried to get on the right side of that. She voted for the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill Republicans pitched as making big data centers pay their own electricity costs. Democrats called it toothless because it only required state regulators to consider such rules, and it failed in the Senate on September 30.

She's not the only Republican suddenly worried about data centers after a year of helping the industry. We counted eight more.

The bottom line

In 2025, Chesapeake Enterprises, the lobbying firm where Scott Reed was the only lobbyist, was paid $110,000 by Ross Perot Jr.'s data center developer to lobby Congress, with Reed as its only lobbyist. Perot gave Susan Collins's campaign $7,000 that year. Collins's own disclosure shows the same firm paid her husband consulting fees, while Reed was also running the super PAC re-electing her and sitting at the center of the Navatek pay-to-play story she says never happened.