Republican Susan Collins rejects corruption allegations as ‘completely false’ | Maine

Susan Collins, U.S. senator from Maine, has dismissed allegations that she traded federal contracts for campaign cash as “completely false” after it emerged that the FBI had looked into the claims.

Asked by a reporter about an ethics complaint filed last week by a Maine attorney, the Republican — who is currently campaigning to keep her seat ahead of November’s U.S. midterm elections — said the allegations were recycled from 2020 and had been dismissed by the Justice Department, the FBI and the Federal Election Commission.

“These allegations are completely false,” Collins said. She said the University of Maine, not defense contractor Navatek, asked her to fund a research grant and that she had never heard of the company. Its former chief executive, Martin Kao, she said, was “a crook” neither she nor the university knew existed.

“We have a photo of him meeting me and others in my office, several months before he made a single contribution,” she added. “He told this story again in the hopes that the judge would be lenient or the prosecutor would be lenient. »

ProPublica reported in September that Kao, Navatek’s former chairman and CEO, told FBI agents and prosecutors that his company earned millions of dollars in federal funding by bankrolling politicians, with Collins serving as its chief patron. Kao, who is serving an 87-month sentence for fraud and campaign finance crimes, claimed Collins’ Super Pac chief asked him for $500,000 in 2019. He claimed he then sent $150,000 through a shell company and that Collins’ office then promised to secure $32 million in naval contracts. ProPublica reported that the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals, funding that Collins said he supported only because the University of Maine asked him to, but did not indicate that the full $32 million was awarded.

The outlet said it reviewed a trove of FBI evidence and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek and the investigation, and independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Among the emails cited were one in which Super Pac Chairman Scott Reed responded “very smart” to Kao’s shell company plan, and another asking for Kao’s phone number so Collins could thank him.

ProPublica also reported that FBI agents sought to open a broader corruption investigation in 2024, which failed after Donald Trump returned to power and purged the bureau’s public corruption teams.

No one in Collins’ orbit has been charged. Kao declined to be interviewed, and Reed denied discussing Kao or Navatek with Collins or his team.

Pressed to explain why she would not agree to an ethics investigation to clear her name, Collins said it was not up to her and dismissed the complaint as the work of “partisan Democrats” and Valerie Adams, a Maine attorney “who lost her election” in the June primary for district attorney.

“I was never even interviewed because there was no evidence,” Collins said.