Collins denies bribery claims as Maine Democrats demand answers
The investigative newsroom ProPublica reported Wednesday that the FBI moved in late 2024 to investigate Sen. Susan Collins for allegedly accepting bribes in connection with her successful bid for a fifth term in 2020, before the Trump administration pushed out the agents leading the case and a Justice Department office overseeing investigations of politicians was gutted.
According to ProPublica’s reporting, the head of a Super PAC supporting Collins solicited a campaign donation from the contracting firm Navatek ahead of the 2020 election. Navatek demanded assurances of government business in return, and the firm’s chief executive, Martin Kao, later routed $150,000 to the Super PAC through a shell company. Kao subsequently told other executives, ProPublica reported, that he had been informed Collins would ensure Navatek won $32 million in federal contracts.
Kao is currently in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud charges — a fact Collins’s office cited in disputing the allegations. Collins’s deputy chief of staff, Annie Clark, called the bribery allegation “categorically false.”
By late 2024, FBI agents were moving toward opening a large-scale political-bribery inquiry into the arrangement, ProPublica reported. The agents leading the case were then pushed out as part of a broader purge of the bureau Trump ordered after returning to power, and the Justice Department office that oversees investigations of politicians was gutted during that same period.
Collins’s campaign manager, Steve Abbott, pointed to investigations conducted under the Biden administration. “In order for that claim to be true, you would have to disbelieve the Biden-led Department of Justice and the Biden-led FBI, who both investigated those contributions and the claims against Senator Collins, her campaign, and her federal staff, thoroughly, and found no basis to charge them,” Abbott said. Abbott also dismissed ProPublica’s reporting as based on allegations from “a guy who was awaiting sentencing for a significant federal offense who was trying to get his sentence reduced, as the article states directly.”
Maine Democrats quickly moved to amplify the allegations. At a Wednesday press conference in Portland, state Democratic Party executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson accused Collins of misconduct in her role as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, a position she has used to channel significant federal investment to Maine. “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,” Murphy-Anderson said. “It is not the first time that she has betrayed us. However, this November we have the opportunity to ensure that it is one of the last.”
Troy Jackson, the former state Senate president and the Democratic nominee to challenge Collins this year, was more pointed. “This is corruption of the highest order,” Jackson said. “We deserve answers about every contract and every conversation that Collins and her team facilitated on the backs of taxpayers. The jig is up.”
The report landed in a race political forecasters consider a toss-up. Collins is the only Republican senator seeking re-election this year in a state Kamala Harris won in 2024, and recent polls have shown Jackson narrowly ahead. Collins has represented Maine since 1997 and survived repeated re-election challenges; in 2020, she beat her Democratic opponent Sara Gideon by eight percentage points even as Joe Biden carried the state in the presidential race.
Lance Dutson, a strategist who worked on Collins’s three most recent re-election campaigns, called ProPublica’s story “a partisan hit piece” and said the $150,000 donation was too small to matter in a 2020 race that he described as so well-funded campaigns struggled to spend the money they raised. “It’s definitely not helpful to have a story implying corruption show up in the newspaper in late September of an election year,” Dutson said.
Dutson nonetheless warned that the allegations arrive against a difficult political backdrop for Collins. “The headwind from Trump is very strong, as you know, and people are very upset about it,” he said. “This race is going to come down to Maine voters deciding whether that national argument is more important than the direct relationship and the positive impact that Collins has had over the state.”
Maine sits at the center of Democrats’ plans to retake the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-seat majority. Beyond Maine, Democrats are looking to win in at least three other states currently held by Republicans that voted for Trump in 2024, while defending seats in Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire.