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                    "Reporting Highlights\n\n\n\n\nProbe: In 2024, the FBI sought to launch a sweeping pay-to-play investigation examining interactions between Sen. Susan Collins and a top donor, records and emails show.\n\n\n\nConfession: The donor, an ex-defense contractor, told agents his company won millions in federal contracts by bankrolling campaigns of powerful politicians.\n\n\n\nShutdown: After Donald Trump returned to office, the investigation died, a casualty of his purge of the FBI. Its closure shut a potential window into how Washington works.\n\n\n\n\nThese highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.\n\n\n\nFor the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump\u2019s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.\n\n\n\nScott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.\n\n\n\nGovernment contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.\n\n\n\nBut the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.\n\n\n\nTo skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said \u2014 and that Navatek would get its government contracts.\n\n\n\nAfter the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek\u2019s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\nThree years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.\n\n\n\nFacing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.\n\n\n\nWhat he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.\n\n\n\nOver three days at the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMost damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company\u2019s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek\u2019s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao\u2019s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.\n\n\n\nKao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.\n\n\n\nEven so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.\n\n\n\nThen Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.\n\n\n\nThe specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao\u2019s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump\u2019s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department\u2019s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao\u2019s case.\n\n\n\nTrump\u2019s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao\u2019s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.\n\n\n\nThe White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.\n\n\n\nFBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago \u201cand ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins\u2019 campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.\u201d Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only \u201cif they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.\u201d\n\n\n\nWilliamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao\u2019s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.\n\n\n\nProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao\u2019s account. Whether or not Kao\u2019s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.\n\n\n\nOf all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao\u2019s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator\u2019s 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.\n\n\n\nRepublican Sen. Susan Collins walks in the annual Moxie Day Parade in July in Lisbon, Maine. Scott Eisen/Getty Images\n\n\n\nCollins\u2019 office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator\u2019s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.\n\n\n\nAnnie Clark, Collins\u2019 deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins\u2019 office \u201cvigorously\u201d denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims \u201coutlandish.\u201d Collins\u2019 campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office \u201cfully cooperated\u201d with the FBI investigation, Clark said.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,\u201d Clark wrote. \u201cThese issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.\u201d\n\n\n\nCollins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls \u201cthe most powerful committee in the Senate.\u201d\n\n\n\nShe demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins\u2019 office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.\n\n\n\n\u201cI spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,\u201d a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. \u201cThe interested company is Navatek.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: \u201cYou\u2019ve seen me deliver,\u201d Kao said.\n\n\n\nReed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. \u201cVery smart,\u201d Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\nReed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao\u2019s allegations. \u201cI understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,\u201d Reed wrote in a brief email. \u201cI never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.\u201d\n\n\n\nBut an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao\u2019s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao\u2019s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.\n\n\n\nSeven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao\u2019s shell company, one of Reed\u2019s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao\u2019s phone number: \u201cSenator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.\u201d\n\n\n\nMartin Kao, second from left, with Collins, center, at a publicity event at Navatek\u2019s Maine headquarters in August 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook\n\n\n\nThe Navatek Method\n\n\n\nBefore Kao\u2019s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui\u2019s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii\u2019s choppy waters.\n\n\n\nThe company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled \u201cKing of Pork\u201d steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as \u201cUncle Dan.\u201d \u201cBefore Inouye took an interest, Congress didn\u2019t even know our companies existed,\u201d a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.\n\n\n\nIn response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up \u201ca minority\u201d of Navatek\u2019s revenue.\n\n\n\nInouye\u2019s death in 2012 made the company\u2019s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek\u2019s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.\n\n\n\nKao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek\u2019s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.\n\n\n\nKao was an unusual figure among the company\u2019s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be \u201ca beast or a bitch,\u201d a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him \u2014 one time, in the middle of the night. \u201cHe had very little interest in the technology,\u201d one former employee recalled. \u201cMartin was only interested in dollar signs.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.\n\n\n\nDespite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.\n\n\n\nNavatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment or bespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.\n\n\n\nSoon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member\u2019s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the \u201cspecialty\u201d of certain lobbyists.\n\n\n\nSeparately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek\u2019s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.\n\n\n\nKao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek\u2019s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not red or blue, I\u2019m green,\u201d he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.\n\n\n\nWhile a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.\n\n\n\nOften, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek\u2019s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for \u201chybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,\u201d \u201celectric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls\u201d and a \u201ctest bed for autonomous ship systems.\u201d Although Navatek\u2019s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.\n\n\n\nOnce the budget passed, lawmakers\u2019 staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office \u2014 and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. \u201cThere\u2019s only so many battles you can fight,\u201d one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek\u2019s projects made little sense.\n\n\n\nInside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as \u201cthe method.\u201d And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt was a simple enough play. Let\u2019s find the small states that have complementary universities \u2026 [and] let\u2019s get access to their senators,\u201d Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. \u201cI\u2019ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, \u2018Well, let\u2019s keep reaching.\u2019 And so we did.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao\u2019s \u201cunethical and illegal method of winning contracts\u201d was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao\u2019s ownership.\n\n\n\nKao boosted Navatek\u2019s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.\n\n\n\nEven Navatek\u2019s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. \u201cIt was eye-opening for me, frankly. \u2018Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It\u2019s all for sale,\u2019\u201d Schiff said.\n\n\n\nThe key players in Kao\u2019s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. \u201cThat is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,\u201d Kao later told the FBI. \u201cSometimes for a 15-minute meeting.\u201d\n\n\n\nBut the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers\u2019 assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as \u201cfundamentally transactional\u201d and having \u201ca reputation as a pay-to-play office.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek\u2019s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.\n\n\n\n\u201cOh my God, all of it is for sale. It\u2019s all for sale.\u201dEric Schiff, former Navatek executive\n\n\n\nWiner was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer\u2019s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show \u201cHouse of Cards\u201d who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.\n\n\n\nIn another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: \u201cWould that \u2018help?\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nWiner, who had already donated himself, replied, \u201cWith my contribution, I think it sends the right message.\u201d He suggested Kao split up his donation to be \u201cless conspicuous.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe method didn\u2019t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.\n\n\n\n\u201cYou should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,\u201d Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.\n\n\n\nWiner said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao\u2019s arrest. \u201cThe political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,\u201d Winer said in an email to ProPublica. \u201cI never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.\u201d\n\n\n\nStrategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.\n\n\n\nNavatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. \u201cYou would be like, \u2018Oh, there\u2019s this senator walking around,\u2019 and we would get a picture with them,\u201d one engineer recalled.\n\n\n\nWhile some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek\u2019s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, \u201cWe thrive in the valley of death,\u201d the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.\n\n\n\nThe Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.\n\n\n\nIn Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the \u201cslamming\u201d impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine\u2019s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world\u2019s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.\n\n\n\n\u201c[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,\u201d recalled one who worked on the project. \u201cThe boats weren\u2019t delivered to the Navy \u2014 the Navy didn\u2019t even want them.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao to Collins: \u201cHere to Help\u201d\n\n\n\nThe first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.\n\n\n\nCollins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions \u2014 in this case, just a few thousand dollars \u2014 it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao\u2019s support.\n\n\n\nNavatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead \u2014 a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.\n\n\n\nTo work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.\n\n\n\nIn that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.\n\n\n\nIn an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.\n\n\n\n\u201cI did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,\u201d Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, \u201cI never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.\u201d Clark, Collins\u2019 deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was \u201cwholly inaccurate\u201d to say Mandigo was close to their office.\n\n\n\nFBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins\u2019 inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.\n\n\n\nThe FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek\u2019s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it should send the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails \u2014 with her scheduler and her campaign\u2019s finance director \u2014 freely mixed talk of Navatek\u2019s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.\n\n\n\nThe principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek\u2019s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company\u2019s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins\u2019 team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father \u2014 which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors \u2014 and sent them his father\u2019s full name and address.\n\n\n\n\u201cThis is perfect,\u201d Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father\u2019s contribution. \u201cWe are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!\u201d\n\n\n\nBefore the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, \u201cYou\u2019ve seen me deliver,\u201d he told the FBI.\n\n\n\nLess than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek\u2019s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser \u2014 who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract \u2014 four days later, saying, \u201cThanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute \u2018needs\u2019 come up,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe are here to help anyway we can \u2026 financially or whatever.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins\u2019 campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.\n\n\n\nThe super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with \u201curgency.\u201d At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC\u2019s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. \u201cThey are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,\u201d Kao reassured him. \u201cThanks for doing this,\u201d Reed replied.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One, David Kring, the company\u2019s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.\n\n\n\nThe other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just \u201ca get to know you meeting\u201d with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the \u201cparticulars of a donation.\u201d Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao\u2019s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.\n\n\n\nA few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins\u2019 office and secured a new round of funding.\n\n\n\n\u201cWe were very warmly received,\u201d Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. \u201cExcellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.\u201d Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek\u2019s proposals.\n\n\n\nNavatek\u2019s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.\n\n\n\nOther documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.\n\n\n\nKao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt was working well, and it would have continued to work well,\u201d said Schiff, the former executive. \u201cMartin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.\u201d\n\n\n\nDownfall, Cover-up\n\n\n\nIn early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of \u201cScientist.\u201d\n\n\n\nThis was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek\u2019s account, not Kao\u2019s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.\n\n\n\nA check for $150,000 to the Collins super PAC 1820 from the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers \u2014 a shell company that obscured the actual donor. PacMar Technologies LLC, fka Martin Defense Group, LLC v. Kao\n\n\n\nThe center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao\u2019s wife\u2019s name on the society\u2019s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.\n\n\n\nInside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC\u2019s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations \u2014 preferably in Maine \u2014 which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. \u201cI want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed \u2014 giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,\u201d wrote Mitchell. \u201cThat would help both of us, I think.\u201d\n\n\n\nMitchell added, \u201cWe should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.\u201d\n\n\n\nMitchell, who later played a major role in Trump\u2019s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.\n\n\n\nKao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts \u2014 that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.\n\n\n\nBut Navatek\u2019s and Kao\u2019s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek\u2019s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.\n\n\n\n\u201cThis is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,\u201d Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao\u2019s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao\u2019s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.\n\n\n\nLoui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao\u2019s tenure who were \u201cnot capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cThe company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao\u2019s arrest, nor should it,\u201d Loui added. \u201cWhat Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.\u201d\n\n\n\nOn Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek\u2019s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company\u2019s IT staff to copy the company\u2019s internal servers.\n\n\n\nNavatek\u2019s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI\u2019s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltrating the National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.\n\n\n\nThe agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek\u2019s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.\n\n\n\nThey zeroed in on Kao\u2019s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao\u2019s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.\n\n\n\nCollins christens a Navatek-designed boat at a University of Maine engineering lab in October 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook\n\n\n\nThe government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer \u2014 including over email \u2014 was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. \u201cWhatever\u2026 just a pack of bitches getting free $,\u201d he wrote.\n\n\n\nIn the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.\n\n\n\nHe began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.\n\n\n\nKao faced nearly a decade in prison. \u201cMy world and life imploded,\u201d he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. \u201cI was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was\u2026.\u2018smart business.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nOver the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. \u201cIt takes two to tangle,\u201d he told them.\n\n\n\nTaxpayers funded Navatek\u2019s entire political operation, Kao said. \u201cMost companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,\u201d he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.\n\n\n\nFor their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek\u2019s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.\n\n\n\nLast year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.\n\n\n\nBoth Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins\u2019 inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins\u2019 campaign manager, referred questions to the senator\u2019s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.\n\n\n\nEarlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.\n\n\n\nBy late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, 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.\n\n\n\nBefore they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump\u2019s retribution campaign.\n\n\n\nBall and Gounaud worked for the FBI\u2019s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.\n\n\n\nBall was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump\u2019s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had \u201cweaponized\u201d the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.\n\n\n\nTrump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit\u2019s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.\n\n\n\nBefore Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.\n\n\n\nBased on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham."
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                    "Reporting Highlights\n\n\n\n\nProbe: In 2024, the FBI sought to launch a sweeping pay-to-play investigation examining interactions between Sen. Susan Collins and a top donor, records and emails show.\n\n\n\nConfession: The donor, an ex-defense contractor, told agents his company won millions in federal contracts by bankrolling campaigns of powerful politicians.\n\n\n\nShutdown: After Donald Trump returned to office, the investigation died, a casualty of his purge of the FBI. Its closure shut a potential window into how Washington works.\n\n\n\n\nThese highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.\n\n\n\n\n\nIn the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.\n\n\n\nFor the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump\u2019s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.\n\n\n\nScott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.\n\n\n\nGovernment contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.\n\n\n\nBut the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.\n\n\n\nTo skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said \u2014 and that Navatek would get its government contracts.\n\n\n\nAfter the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek\u2019s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\nThree years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.\n\n\n\nFacing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.\n\n\n\nWhat he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.\n\n\n\nOver three days at the U.S. attorney\u2019s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nMost damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company\u2019s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek\u2019s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao\u2019s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.\n\n\n\nKao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.\n\n\n\nEven so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.\n\n\n\nThen Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.\n\n\n\nThe specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao\u2019s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump\u2019s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department\u2019s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao\u2019s case.\n\n\n\nTrump\u2019s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao\u2019s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.\n\n\n\nThe White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.\n\n\n\nFBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago \u201cand ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins\u2019 campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.\u201d Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only \u201cif they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.\u201d\n\n\n\nWilliamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao\u2019s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.\n\n\n\nProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao\u2019s account. Whether or not Kao\u2019s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.\n\n\n\nOf all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao\u2019s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator\u2019s 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.\n\n\n\nRepublican Sen. Susan Collins walks in the annual Moxie Day Parade in July in Lisbon, Maine. Scott Eisen/Getty Images\n\n\n\nCollins\u2019 office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator\u2019s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.\n\n\n\nAnnie Clark, Collins\u2019 deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins\u2019 office \u201cvigorously\u201d denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims \u201coutlandish.\u201d Collins\u2019 campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office \u201cfully cooperated\u201d with the FBI investigation, Clark said.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,\u201d Clark wrote. \u201cThese issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.\u201d\n\n\n\nCollins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls \u201cthe most powerful committee in the Senate.\u201d\n\n\n\nShe demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins\u2019 office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.\n\n\n\n\u201cI spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,\u201d a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. \u201cThe interested company is Navatek.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: \u201cYou\u2019ve seen me deliver,\u201d Kao said.\n\n\n\nReed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. \u201cVery smart,\u201d Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\nReed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao\u2019s allegations. \u201cI understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,\u201d Reed wrote in a brief email. \u201cI never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.\u201d\n\n\n\nBut an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao\u2019s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao\u2019s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.\n\n\n\nSeven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao\u2019s shell company, one of Reed\u2019s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao\u2019s phone number: \u201cSenator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.\u201d\n\n\n\nMartin Kao, second from left, with Collins, center, at a publicity event at Navatek\u2019s Maine headquarters in August 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook\n\n\n\nThe Navatek Method\n\n\n\nBefore Kao\u2019s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui\u2019s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii\u2019s choppy waters.\n\n\n\nThe company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled \u201cKing of Pork\u201d steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as \u201cUncle Dan.\u201d \u201cBefore Inouye took an interest, Congress didn\u2019t even know our companies existed,\u201d a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.\n\n\n\nIn response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up \u201ca minority\u201d of Navatek\u2019s revenue.\n\n\n\nInouye\u2019s death in 2012 made the company\u2019s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek\u2019s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.\n\n\n\nKao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek\u2019s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.\n\n\n\nKao was an unusual figure among the company\u2019s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be \u201ca beast or a bitch,\u201d a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him \u2014 one time, in the middle of the night. \u201cHe had very little interest in the technology,\u201d one former employee recalled. \u201cMartin was only interested in dollar signs.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.\n\n\n\nDespite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.\n\n\n\nNavatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment or bespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.\n\n\n\nSoon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member\u2019s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the \u201cspecialty\u201d of certain lobbyists.\n\n\n\nSeparately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek\u2019s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.\n\n\n\nKao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek\u2019s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019m not red or blue, I\u2019m green,\u201d he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.\n\n\n\nWhile a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.\n\n\n\nOften, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek\u2019s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for \u201chybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,\u201d \u201celectric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls\u201d and a \u201ctest bed for autonomous ship systems.\u201d Although Navatek\u2019s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.\n\n\n\nOnce the budget passed, lawmakers\u2019 staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office \u2014 and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. \u201cThere\u2019s only so many battles you can fight,\u201d one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek\u2019s projects made little sense.\n\n\n\nInside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as \u201cthe method.\u201d And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt was a simple enough play. Let\u2019s find the small states that have complementary universities \u2026 [and] let\u2019s get access to their senators,\u201d Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. \u201cI\u2019ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, \u2018Well, let\u2019s keep reaching.\u2019 And so we did.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao\u2019s \u201cunethical and illegal method of winning contracts\u201d was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao\u2019s ownership.\n\n\n\nKao boosted Navatek\u2019s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.\n\n\n\nEven Navatek\u2019s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. \u201cIt was eye-opening for me, frankly. \u2018Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It\u2019s all for sale,\u2019\u201d Schiff said.\n\n\n\nThe key players in Kao\u2019s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. \u201cThat is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,\u201d Kao later told the FBI. \u201cSometimes for a 15-minute meeting.\u201d\n\n\n\nBut the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers\u2019 assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as \u201cfundamentally transactional\u201d and having \u201ca reputation as a pay-to-play office.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek\u2019s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.\n\n\n\n\u201cOh my God, all of it is for sale. It\u2019s all for sale.\u201dEric Schiff, former Navatek executive\n\n\n\nWiner was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer\u2019s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show \u201cHouse of Cards\u201d who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.\n\n\n\nIn another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: \u201cWould that \u2018help?\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nWiner, who had already donated himself, replied, \u201cWith my contribution, I think it sends the right message.\u201d He suggested Kao split up his donation to be \u201cless conspicuous.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe method didn\u2019t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.\n\n\n\n\u201cYou should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,\u201d Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.\n\n\n\nWiner said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao\u2019s arrest. \u201cThe political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,\u201d Winer said in an email to ProPublica. \u201cI never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.\u201d\n\n\n\nStrategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.\n\n\n\nNavatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. \u201cYou would be like, \u2018Oh, there\u2019s this senator walking around,\u2019 and we would get a picture with them,\u201d one engineer recalled.\n\n\n\nWhile some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek\u2019s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, \u201cWe thrive in the valley of death,\u201d the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.\n\n\n\nThe Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.\n\n\n\nIn Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the \u201cslamming\u201d impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine\u2019s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world\u2019s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.\n\n\n\n\u201c[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,\u201d recalled one who worked on the project. \u201cThe boats weren\u2019t delivered to the Navy \u2014 the Navy didn\u2019t even want them.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao to Collins: \u201cHere to Help\u201d\n\n\n\nThe first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.\n\n\n\nCollins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions \u2014 in this case, just a few thousand dollars \u2014 it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao\u2019s support.\n\n\n\nNavatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead \u2014 a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.\n\n\n\nTo work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.\n\n\n\nIn that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.\n\n\n\nIn an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.\n\n\n\n\u201cI did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,\u201d Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, \u201cI never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.\u201d Clark, Collins\u2019 deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was \u201cwholly inaccurate\u201d to say Mandigo was close to their office.\n\n\n\nFBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins\u2019 inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.\n\n\n\nThe FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek\u2019s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it should send the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails \u2014 with her scheduler and her campaign\u2019s finance director \u2014 freely mixed talk of Navatek\u2019s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.\n\n\n\nThe principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek\u2019s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company\u2019s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins\u2019 team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father \u2014 which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors \u2014 and sent them his father\u2019s full name and address.\n\n\n\n\u201cThis is perfect,\u201d Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father\u2019s contribution. \u201cWe are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!\u201d\n\n\n\nBefore the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, \u201cYou\u2019ve seen me deliver,\u201d he told the FBI.\n\n\n\nLess than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek\u2019s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser \u2014 who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract \u2014 four days later, saying, \u201cThanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute \u2018needs\u2019 come up,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe are here to help anyway we can \u2026 financially or whatever.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins\u2019 campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.\n\n\n\nThe super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with \u201curgency.\u201d At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC\u2019s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. \u201cThey are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,\u201d Kao reassured him. \u201cThanks for doing this,\u201d Reed replied.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One, David Kring, the company\u2019s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.\n\n\n\nThe other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just \u201ca get to know you meeting\u201d with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the \u201cparticulars of a donation.\u201d Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao\u2019s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.\n\n\n\nA few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins\u2019 office and secured a new round of funding.\n\n\n\n\u201cWe were very warmly received,\u201d Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. \u201cExcellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.\u201d Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek\u2019s proposals.\n\n\n\nNavatek\u2019s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.\n\n\n\nOther documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.\n\n\n\nKao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt was working well, and it would have continued to work well,\u201d said Schiff, the former executive. \u201cMartin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.\u201d\n\n\n\nDownfall, Cover-up\n\n\n\nIn early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of \u201cScientist.\u201d\n\n\n\nThis was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek\u2019s account, not Kao\u2019s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.\n\n\n\nA check for $150,000 to the Collins super PAC 1820 from the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers \u2014 a shell company that obscured the actual donor. PacMar Technologies LLC, fka Martin Defense Group, LLC v. Kao\n\n\n\nThe center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao\u2019s wife\u2019s name on the society\u2019s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.\n\n\n\nInside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC\u2019s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations \u2014 preferably in Maine \u2014 which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. \u201cI want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed \u2014 giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,\u201d wrote Mitchell. \u201cThat would help both of us, I think.\u201d\n\n\n\nMitchell added, \u201cWe should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.\u201d\n\n\n\nMitchell, who later played a major role in Trump\u2019s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.\n\n\n\nKao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts \u2014 that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.\n\n\n\nBut Navatek\u2019s and Kao\u2019s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek\u2019s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.\n\n\n\n\u201cThis is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,\u201d Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao\u2019s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao\u2019s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.\n\n\n\nLoui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao\u2019s tenure who were \u201cnot capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cThe company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao\u2019s arrest, nor should it,\u201d Loui added. \u201cWhat Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.\u201d\n\n\n\nOn Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek\u2019s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company\u2019s IT staff to copy the company\u2019s internal servers.\n\n\n\nNavatek\u2019s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI\u2019s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltrating the National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.\n\n\n\nThe agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek\u2019s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.\n\n\n\nThey zeroed in on Kao\u2019s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao\u2019s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.\n\n\n\nCollins christens a Navatek-designed boat at a University of Maine engineering lab in October 2019. U.S. Sen. Susan Collins via Facebook\n\n\n\nThe government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer \u2014 including over email \u2014 was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. \u201cWhatever\u2026 just a pack of bitches getting free $,\u201d he wrote.\n\n\n\nIn the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.\n\n\n\nHe began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.\n\n\n\nKao faced nearly a decade in prison. \u201cMy world and life imploded,\u201d he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. \u201cI was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was\u2026.\u2018smart business.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nOver the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. \u201cIt takes two to tangle,\u201d he told them.\n\n\n\nTaxpayers funded Navatek\u2019s entire political operation, Kao said. \u201cMost companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,\u201d he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.\n\n\n\nFor their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek\u2019s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.\n\n\n\nLast year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.\n\n\n\nBoth Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins\u2019 inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins\u2019 campaign manager, referred questions to the senator\u2019s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.\n\n\n\nEarlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.\n\n\n\nBy late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, 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.\n\n\n\nBefore they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump\u2019s retribution campaign.\n\n\n\nBall and Gounaud worked for the FBI\u2019s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.\n\n\n\nBall was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump\u2019s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had \u201cweaponized\u201d the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.\n\n\n\nTrump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit\u2019s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.\n\n\n\nBefore Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.\n\n\n\nBased on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham."
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