Trump FBI ended pay-to-play probe involving Collins

What happened

Senior FBI officials last year shut down a nascent “sweeping bribery probe” that included pay-to-play allegations involving Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ProPublica reported Tuesday, citing a “trove of evidence gathered by the FBI,” legal records and dozens of interviews. The FBI investigation stemmed from three 2024 “tell-all interviews” with Martin Kao, the former head of a Hawaiian defense contractor that secretly donated tens of thousands of dollars to Collins’ campaign after she reportedly steered millions in federal contracts to the company for research “of no real value.” Kao pleaded guilty in 2022 to illegal campaign contributions and pandemic-aid fraud charges and was sentenced to 87 months in prison in February 2025.

Who said what

ProPublica’s “truly outrageous” report is “clearly a political hit job,” Collins told reporters Tuesday, and the “seven-year-old allegations” were “thoroughly investigated” and dismissed by the Biden Justice Department in 2021. Kao’s detailed 2024 confessions “opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation,” ProPublica said. But agents didn’t “uncover much evidence to corroborate” his claims about Collins and her advisers, The New York Times said, citing “current and former officials” who also “acknowledged that it was possible more could have surfaced if the investigation had developed further.”

What next?

President Donald Trump’s “purge of anyone who had ever investigated him” eviscerated the federal units “handling public corruption investigations,” ProPublica said, and the probe “sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead.”

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