According to a new investigation from ProPublica, Sen. Susan Collins narrowly escaped being embroiled in an FBI bribery probe into defense contracts, lawmakers and large campaign contributions. For that, she can thank the Trump administration’s commitment to making America a place where the wealthy, connected and morally flexible can get away with almost anything. The good news is that if we’re determined enough, we can undo the damage that has been done.
ProPublica’s story begins in 2019, when the head of Collins’ super PAC, Scott Reed, met with executives from a defense contractor called Navatek that the senator had helped land a Navy research contract in Maine. Then Collins’ fundraiser made a request: The company should make a six-figure donation to help the senator in her re-election bid. The executives said they would pony up — if Collins helped them get more contracts.
When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, he gutted the Justice Department’s public integrity section, the unit that investigates political corruption.
But government contractors aren’t allowed to contribute to campaigns.
“To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds,” ProPublica reported, “Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO [Martin Kao] wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.”
When the FBI closed in on Kao, he gave them the names of “dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts.” ProPublica said it independently corroborated much of his account by reviewing legal records and evidence the FBI gathered, and by conducting dozens of interviews.
As chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Collins has enormous power over where government funds are spent. According to ProPublica, “The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.”
In a statement, the FBI told ProPublica that it “ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.” In an email to ProPublica, a staffer for Collins said the senator’s office participated in the FBI’s probe, and it “’vigorously denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims ‘outlandish.’”
When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, he gutted the Justice Department’s public integrity section, the unit that investigates political corruption. Most of its attorneys were pushed out, Reuters reported in June 2025, and the unit lost its authority to file new cases. The investigation into Kao’s claims never went ahead. It was part of a wider purge at the DOJ, in which attorneys, prosecutors and FBI agents who had ever investigated Trump, the Jan. 6 insurrection, Russia’s interference in the 2020 election or other matters Trump would prefer not to have a light shined on them could expect to be pushed out or fired.
Can the sorry state of American political ethics be improved? The answer is: absolutely.
The president has also pardoned a gaggle of fraudsters, including multiple corrupt politicians; nearly eliminated enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (which bars Americans from paying bribes overseas); and “stepped back from the kinds of complicated investigations into foreign bribery, money laundering and public corruption that former department leaders often cited among their greatest successes,” as The Wall Street Journal reported.
Kao went to jail for multiple crimes, but the investigation into the broader system his allegations prompted was one of the casualties of the Trump administration’s new permissiveness toward corruption and white-collar crime. We haven’t even gotten into the Trump’s own shocking self-dealing and exploitation of his office for personal gain, seemingly built on the (partly correct) assumption that if he doesn’t hide his actions, he’ll never be held accountable for it. But it’s no wonder that Gallup recently found that “Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years.”
Can the sorry state of American political ethics be improved? The answer is: absolutely.
There will always be corrupt officials who seek to use public office for their own gain. But they will only do what they think they can get away with. Yes, we should bolster our degraded norms against the kind of personal profiteering Trump has engaged in. But even more important is to create a system that makes unethical behavior not just as shameful, but as illegal. And one in which people know that when they break the law, they’ll be punished.
That means restoring the DOJ that Trump and his cronies have so tragically degraded — including hiring lots of agents and prosecutors to investigate and (if warranted) indict those who break the laws that still exist. The sight of a few politicians being carted off to jail can be quite illuminating for those contemplating whether they should take a payoff.
It will also mean passing new laws to reverse the damage the Supreme Court has done to corruption prosecutions in the United States. In a series of cases, they have narrowed the definition of bribery so far that a politician practically has to buy a billboard saying that “ these are the bribes I have taken!” to be convicted. In one case, a mayor was convicted of bribery for accepting a $13,000 payoff in exchange for sending over $1 million in contracts to a trucking company. But because the payment came after the contract, the court’s conservatives ruled it was not a bribe but merely a “gratuity” for a job well done. Justice Brett Kavanaugh actually compared it to giving your kid’s teacher a gift basket at the end of the year.
The court’s absurd reading of laws against bribery and corruption need not be permanent. Congress can pass new, more restrictive laws. The next president can sign those laws and reform the court. That president can also announce and prosecute a new war on white-collar criminals — crypto scammers, influence-peddlers, inside traders and grifters of all kinds. Start making examples of them, show that we won’t be soft on white-collar crime any longer, and this era of graft might be put behind us.
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