Susan Collins likes to tell Maine voters how much federal money she brings home. She calls the Senate Appropriations Committee she leads "the most powerful committee in the Senate."

On Monday, ProPublica showed what that power looked like for one Hawaii defense contractor. From 2018 to 2020, Collins put millions of dollars for a company called Navatek into the defense budget. Her office then pushed the Navy to hand the company that money. At the same time, her campaign and the super PAC backing her were taking money from Navatek's CEO — much of it illegal.

That CEO, Martin Kao, is now in federal prison. Before he went, he sat down with FBI anti-corruption agents and told them the whole thing was pay-to-play. The agents believed they had enough to open a bribery investigation. Then Donald Trump took office, and the unit that would have run it was gutted.

The money went out. The money came back.

Here is the timeline ProPublica pieced together from FBI evidence, company emails and court records.

• 2018. Kao meets Collins for the first time. He told the FBI she would not meet with him unless he agreed to donate to her campaign. He pitched an $8 million boat research project for Navatek and the University of Maine. That summer, Kao and his wife gave to Collins — and right after, Collins put the $8 million into the defense budget.
• February 2019. A Navy official writes in an email: "I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M. The interested company is Navatek." Contracts like that are supposed to be competitive.
• August 2019. Collins visits Navatek's Maine office for a photo op with Kao and a model of the company's boat. Ahead of the visit, Kao arranged more than $40,000 in donations from his extended family. Collins' campaign finance director wrote to him: "We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!"
• September 2019. Less than a month later, the Senate's draft defense budget sets aside $21.5 million for Navatek's projects in Maine. Four days after that, Kao emails a Collins campaign fundraiser: "Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins… We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever."
• Late 2019. At a Corner Bakery near the Capitol, the head of the pro-Collins super PAC, Scott Reed, asks Navatek executives for $500,000. Kao sends $150,000 through a shell company. When Kao told Reed by email about his shell company plan, Reed wrote back: "Very smart."
• Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check. One of Reed's staff emails a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao's phone number: "Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him."
• February 2020. Kao meets with Collins' office again and reports back to his team: "Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported." The Senate set aside at least $10 million that year based on Navatek's proposals.

The shell company was named the "Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers." It had been created five weeks before it wrote the $150,000 check. The Campaign Legal Center spotted it in the super PAC's filings and filed a federal complaint. A Hawaii reporter soon found Kao's wife's name on the paperwork.

"You've seen me deliver"

Kao's account of one meeting is the heart of the story. Before the August 2019 event, he told the FBI, he met privately with Collins and two campaign staffers. One staffer told him the campaign expected more donations. And Collins, he said, told him: "You've seen me deliver."

That is Kao's word. He is a convicted felon who was trying to shorten his prison time, and ProPublica says so plainly. Collins' office "vigorously" denies any bribery or pay-to-play and calls his claims "outlandish."

But ProPublica also says it independently confirmed much of what Kao told agents. And the FBI agents who went through hundreds of thousands of seized records found much of it matched his story. By late 2024, according to a memo ProPublica saw, the agents had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress — and they had questioned Kao at length about Collins and her office.

Kao also said something else that should bother every taxpayer in Maine. Navatek's research, he told the FBI, was of no real value. The boat work in Maine won a Guinness World Record for the largest 3D-printed boat. But a former employee told ProPublica the result was "a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper," adding: "The Navy didn't even want them."

The crimes are not in dispute

Whatever you think of Kao's word, the illegal money is not a matter of opinion.

In 2022, Kao and two other Navatek executives were charged with handing company money to relatives to donate to Collins and with the shell company check to her super PAC. Kao pleaded guilty that fall, and the other two pleaded guilty the next year. Last October, Kao was sentenced to 33 months for sending more than $200,000 in illegal contributions to Collins and the super PAC. He was already serving 87 months for cheating a COVID relief program out of nearly $13 million.

Collins' office says the matter was "resolved" when her campaign gave back the illegal money "that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge." Nobody working for Collins was charged.

But the people at the center of it never left her side. ProPublica reports that Amy Abbott — the finance director who thanked Kao for "ALL the Kao support" — is the finance director of Collins' 2026 campaign. Scott Reed — who called the shell company "very smart" — again chairs the main pro-Collins super PAC. Reed told ProPublica he "never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek."

Then the investigators were purged

The two FBI agents who took Kao's confession worked in the Bureau's top anti-corruption unit. One of them, Michelle Ball, had also worked on the investigation into Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Under FBI Director Kash Patel, she was fired in October 2025 in a letter saying she had "weaponized" the Justice Department. Her partner was pushed out in early 2026.

The Justice Department prosecutors who handle cases against politicians fared no better. That team collapsed in February 2025, and Trump's appointees ordered the prosecutors who remained to stop opening new corruption cases. The career attorney on Kao's case quit.

ProPublica's conclusion: the investigation Kao's confession set off "is dead," and the government "is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress." An FBI spokesperson told ProPublica the Bureau had looked at Collins years ago and "found nothing." He did not answer questions about the newer investigation.

Collins has watched that Justice Department take shape — and helped build it. In March 2025, she voted to confirm Todd Blanche as the department's second-in-command. She only turned against him this year, after it was clear her vote wouldn't sink him.

A pattern, not an accident

This is not the first time Collins' fundraising has run straight into her official work. She helped write the law requiring members of Congress to report their stock trades — and then failed to report up to $395,000 in trades herself. Her super PAC this cycle took $2 million from Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire named in the Epstein files, months before she voted to kill an amendment forcing the files' release.

What the record shows

From 2018 to 2020, Susan Collins put millions of dollars for Navatek into the defense budget, and her office pushed the Navy to give the company that money. During those same years, Navatek's CEO sent more than $200,000 in illegal contributions to Collins and her super PAC — a crime he and two other executives pleaded guilty to. He later told the FBI that Collins said, "You've seen me deliver." Collins denies it. Trump's Justice Department never tested it: the corruption squad that heard him was purged, and the investigation his confession started is dead.

Source

The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way — ProPublica, September 2026. Illustration: Beatrice Caciotti for ProPublica.