FBI Anti-Corruption Investigators Targeted Susan Collins in Bribery Probe — But Then Trump Happened: Report

(Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

FBI investigators were looking at Maine Senator Susan Collins (R) in a potential bribery probe before President Donald Trump returned to office and revamped the bureau, according to an eye-opening report Tuesday in ProPublica.

The feds were closing in on a pay-to-play investigation involving Navatek, a Hawaiian defense contractor, ProPublica reported.

As ProPublica reported:

Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.

But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.

Three years later, Kao was indicted by a grand jury for making illegal campaign contributions, and questioned by the FBI, to whom he reportedly sang like a canary:

Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.

But when Trump returned to the White House in 2025, a deconstruction of the team behind the Kao probe followed, including the investigator who took Kao’s confession (who also investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election), ProPublica reported.

As the outlet put it, the probe sparked by the information Kao provided “is dead.”

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson told ProPublica that the probe “ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.”

Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.

In an email to ProPublica, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, Annie Clark, said the senator’s office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play allegations, and rejected Kao’s “outlandish” claims.

“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark told ProPublica. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”

Collins is currently engaged in a fight to keep her Senate seat against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson in November’s midterm elections.

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