On September 22, 2026, ProPublica revealed that a defense contractor who funneled illegal money to Sen. Susan Collins's super PAC later handed the FBI a detailed account of buying influence in Congress, and that the investigation it set off is dead after the Trump administration dismantled the FBI and Justice Department units that handle public corruption. “ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time,” the outlet wrote, drawing on “a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records” and interviews with dozens of people. It is the first story in a series.
The contractor was Martin Kao, CEO of the Hawaiian firm Navatek. In late 2019, Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, met Navatek executives at a Corner Bakery in Washington and “asked them for a $500,000 donation.” Kao “sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company,” and two months later “told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.” Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check, one of Reed's subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.” In February 2019, a Navy official had written, “I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” adding, “The interested company is Navatek.” Kao pleaded guilty in 2022 to campaign finance crimes and to defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program, and “No one working for Collins was charged.” When the shell company drew scrutiny, the super PAC's lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, suggested it give scholarships, “particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.” ProPublica notes Mitchell “later played a major role in Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.”
Kao began cooperating. In September 2024 he “handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek's dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff,” which ProPublica calls “not only a confession but a road map.” He told agents that in a private meeting Collins said, “You've seen me deliver.” That is Kao's account alone, and ProPublica is direct about its limits: “Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.” It also says, “We independently corroborated much of Kao's account.” By late 2024 the two FBI agents on the case, Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, “had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica.” Ball persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It “centered on South Carolina,” and “The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham.”
Then the units that would have run it were taken apart. Ball and Gounaud worked on CR-15, which ProPublica describes as the FBI's elite anti-corruption unit, specializing in misconduct by elected officials. “When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent,” ProPublica reports. NBC News reported in May 2025 that the FBI was folding the squad, and in October 2025 Patel announced, “We terminated employees, we abolished the weaponized CR-15 squad, and we initiated an ongoing investigation with more accountability measures ahead.” Ball “was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had 'weaponized' the Justice Department,” over her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election; she is suing over it. Gounaud “was pushed out in early 2026.” On the prosecutors' side, the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section “collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams,” and “Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases.” NOTUS reported in September 2025 that the section, which had 36 attorneys assigned full-time to corruption cases when Trump took office, was down to two. The career attorney assigned to Kao's case quit.
What ProPublica does and does not show matters here. It states that “The investigation sparked by Kao's revelations is dead,” but it does not say who closed it or when, and nothing in the story shows Trump or his appointees acting to protect Collins; the approved probe centered on South Carolina, not Maine. What it documents is institutional: the agents and prosecutors who would have pursued the case were removed, and “Trump's Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said.”
Everyone named denied wrongdoing. The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI. FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the bureau had investigated years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins' campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false,” and that agents are removed only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.” He did not answer questions about the investigation opened in 2024. Collins's deputy chief of staff, Annie Clark, said the office “vigorously” denies Kao's allegations, which she called “outlandish,” and wrote, “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.” Reed wrote, “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”
The dismantling of CR-15 and the Public Integrity Section is confirmed by NBC News, Fox News, NOTUS and NPR, and Kao's guilty plea and sentence by the Bangor Daily News and Honolulu Civil Beat. The 2024 investigation and its end are, so far, reported only by ProPublica. Related: the lawsuit by fired FBI agents, including Ball (Patel Fires About a Dozen FBI Staff From the Trump Documents Case After Revealing That Smith's Team Subpoenaed His Phone Records), and the broader purge (DOJ Weaponization Against Political Opponents).
Update (October 20, 2026): ProPublica reported that the FBI's investigation centered on a March 2020 steakhouse dinner at which, Kao later told the FBI, Sen. Lindsey Graham “agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek's way” and asked Kao to pledge $100,000 to his reelection campaign. Kao said Rep. James Clyburn and Rep. Joe Wilson made similar requests. The FBI named two former Navatek executives as subjects; it “did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao,” ProPublica reported. Graham's office called Kao's claims the “ravings of a convicted felon,” and an FBI spokesman called them “half baked.” ProPublica's headline says the purge “saved” Graham and Clyburn; its reporting shows the probe ended with the purge, not that protecting them was the purpose. Graham died earlier in 2026.