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Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham\u2019s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.\n\n\n\nNavatek\u2019s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.\n\n\n\n\u201cShoot all he has to really do is stop by and say \u2018yes,\u2019\u201d Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. \u201cThat should only take a minute and he\u2019s on his way. We don\u2019t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the \u201cyes\u201d he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek\u2019s way in his native South Carolina, Kao later recounted to the FBI. In exchange, he said, Graham asked Kao to pledge a total of $100,000 to his reelection campaign.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cPaper Trail\u201d Podcast\n\n\n\nHear the reporters discuss their reporting on the FBI on \u201dPaper Trail.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\nIn early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham\u2019s steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.\n\n\n\nThe scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said \u2014 in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state\u2019s top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.\n\n\n\nKao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: \u201cThis is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,\u201d Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s admissions would constitute a vast criminal bribery scheme if they could be proved in court \u2014 a challenge, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult to win corruption cases. Kao himself posed another hurdle. He was facing prison for fraud and campaign finance violations and was speaking to the FBI in the hopes of reducing his sentence.\n\n\n\nBut the FBI agents who took Kao\u2019s confession \u2014 two experienced anti-corruption investigators \u2014 could see that much of it lined up with a trove of records they had seized from Navatek. They forged ahead. The FBI took the formal step of naming two former Navatek executives who had worked with Kao as subjects of a bribery investigation. The agency did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao. The agents indicated to their superiors that the lawmakers could become subjects in the future, according to records viewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\n\nThe details of this investigation have not previously been reported.\n\n\n\nPresident Donald Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately gutted the specialized FBI and Department of Justice teams dedicated to taking on public corruption \u2014 an act of revenge for having previously investigated him. The two experienced agents on the case were swept up in the purge, and the career prosecutor assisting them quit after Trump appointees forbid the DOJ\u2019s anti-corruption section from filing any new cases. Today, there is no one left to look into Kao\u2019s explosive allegations, as the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption. The case is dead.\n\n\n\nProPublica has unearthed the investigation by reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, internal company emails, evidence the FBI used to vet Kao\u2019s claims and dozens of interviews with people who saw how Navatek operated, including an eyewitness to Graham and Kao\u2019s secret steakhouse dinner.\n\n\n\nThis story is part of a series based on our reporting. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had probed the conduct of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who steered millions in government funding toward Navatek while Kao gave her illegal campaign donations. Collins denied wrongdoing and dismissed Kao as a \u201cconvicted liar.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao is indeed the only person involved to serve prison time. He pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign donations and a loan fraud scheme in 2022. In 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months in prison.\n\n\n\nGraham died at 71 earlier this year. His sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill his seat, retained most of his senior staff, including those who dealt with Navatek. She even took up some of his committee assignments, including appropriations. Darline Graham is running for a full term in office this November.\n\n\n\nClyburn, 86, is one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. He is widely credited with tipping the scales for Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Wilson remains influential on national defense spending from his senior perch on the Armed Services Committee.\n\n\n\nJames Clyburn, left, and Lindsey Graham speak during an event at the White House to celebrate the 2023-24 University of South Carolina Gamecocks NCAA women\u2019s basketball championship team. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images\n\n\n\n\u201cWhatever a donor may think or say, a donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor\u2019s request,\u201d Jami LaRue, Clyburn\u2019s communications director, wrote in response to detailed questions. \u201cThe Congressman has always striven to assist the University of South Carolina and all of the colleges and universities in his district when called upon to further their important missions. The crimes and lies of an imprisoned fraudster will not cause the Congressman to waver in his support for these fine institutions.\u201d\n\n\n\nDavid Snider, Wilson\u2019s communications director, did not address a detailed list of questions sent by ProPublica. \u201cCongressman Wilson does and has always abided by campaign donation regulations set forth by the Federal Election Commission,\u201d Snider said in an email.\n\n\n\nIn an emailed statement, Taylor Reidy, who was Lindsey Graham\u2019s communications director and now holds the same post for his sister, wrote that \u201cany allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior or wrongdoing by the late Senator Lindsey Graham or his staff are simply false.\u201d She said the accusations were the \u201cravings of a convicted felon\u201d and that her office was never contacted by the FBI about the matter. After Kao\u2019s arrest, they disgorged his donations, she added.\n\n\n\n\nThe two executives who were subjects of the FBI investigation, Duke Hartman and Joshua Knight, were never charged. Hartman, the other executive at the dinner meeting with Graham, is now the CEO of a new naval research company called Integer Technologies that he co-founded with Knight after Kao\u2019s arrest. Integer was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing government contractors in the country. It also became the ultimate beneficiary of the Graham dinner meeting, picking up the contract Graham allegedly agreed to facilitate that night.\n\n\n\nHartman and Knight did not respond to detailed requests for comment.\n\n\n\n\u201c[It\u2019s] corruption at its best,\u201d Kao wrote to ProPublica from federal detention in South Dakota, before cutting off contact. \u201cBut I am the only one rotting in prison.\u201d\n\n\n\nSmall Company, Big Ambitions\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s dinner with Graham was part of his grandiose plan to make Navatek a major defense contractor.\n\n\n\nHe had become the CEO at an uncertain moment in the company\u2019s history. Founded in Hawaii in the 1970s, the company originally thrived on a close relationship with the state\u2019s powerful senior senator, Daniel Inouye. When Kao assumed ownership in 2019, it had been several years since Inouye had died, and Navatek was in need of a new patron in Washington.\n\n\n\nAt times, Kao hardly seemed the person to pull this off. He had started out as the company\u2019s CFO and was openly uninterested in its technology. He told bombastic lies about his personal life. Former employees said he regaled them with tales of selling newspapers for members of the Bloods and Crips street gangs as a youth. In a deposition, Kao later admitted that wasn\u2019t true.\n\n\n\nBut what he lacked in engineering chops he made up with ambition. Once, Kao held a company town hall using a map of the U.S. dotted with future Navatek offices as his backdrop, a former employee recalled. \u201cHe would talk about how we\u2019re a $10 million company, and in the next three years, we\u2019re going to be a billion-dollar company,\u201d said a former engineer. \u201cHe was an absolute megalomaniac.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao hatched a plan to expand Navatek\u2019s presence across the country, making new friends in Congress along the way. He courted politicians using something he called \u201cthe method,\u201d as ProPublica detailed in September.\n\n\n\nNavatek would open an office in the state or district of a powerful member of Congress and partner with a local university to concoct a proposal for federally funded research. Then, aided by a well-connected lobbyist and the sheen of credibility from its association with the university, Navatek would approach the member for federal research funding.\n\n\n\nKao told the FBI he would strike deals in small, face-to-face meetings with the members or their trusted staff. Navatek \u2014 through executives, family members and lobbyists \u2014 would make generous campaign donations. In exchange, the member would add detailed language to the defense budget to fund the company\u2019s work.\n\n\n\nThat legislative language would not name the company. But it would describe specific work that Navatek was already planning to do behind the scenes, making it the only logical choice for the eventual government contract. The lawmakers\u2019 staff would also backchannel with the Navy after the bill was passed to make sure contracting offices knew to direct the money to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show \u2014 even though the contracts were in theory competitive.\n\n\n\n\nKao \u201cwanted to build a company as big as he could as fast as he could,\u201d a former executive later testified in court. For a while, he succeeded. Under Kao, Navatek went from having to \u201crebuild,\u201d as the executive put it, to winning $40.7 million in new government contracts in 2020.\n\n\n\nHartman, the other Navatek executive who went to dinner with Graham, was in charge of maintaining friendly ties in Congress while tracking the millions of dollars the company had requested in research funds. He kept careful tabs on the company\u2019s progress using dozens of color-coded spreadsheets. \u201cIf anyone knows the impropriety of the business model, it\u2019s him,\u201d Kao told the FBI, referring to Hartman.\n\n\n\nLater, these spreadsheets provided the FBI a detailed picture of which congressional offices worked closest with Navatek. In the tables devoted to South Carolina, Navatek denoted Graham as a \u201ckey supporter.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe company primarily targeted lawmakers from smaller states who sat on appropriations committees, like Collins, Kao explained to the FBI, because they wielded huge power over the budget while having fewer \u201cconstituents to \u2018feed.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nThe senior senator from South Carolina was another prime target. \u201cYou can get access to Lindsey Graham,\u201d Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, said in an interview.\n\n\n\nKao, Hartman and other Navatek executives approached the offices of Graham, Clyburn and Wilson \u2014 all powerful members of the South Carolina delegation \u2014 in the beginning of 2019. The company had recruited the University of South Carolina for a joint research project, and together they asked the lawmakers to find $9.5 million to fund the work. If it succeeded, Navatek planned to ask Congress to re-up the funding for two more years as well as green-light two more projects, internal company records show, for a total of up to $90 million in South Carolina alone.\n\n\n\nYet Navatek had \u201czero people\u201d capable of doing the research it was pitching, said a former executive with direct knowledge of the work.\n\n\n\nIts $9.5 million \u201cpower and energy\u201d proposal promised cutting-edge research on how to distribute the limited power on board a ship between multiple energy-intense systems, like radars, lasers and rail guns. Graham\u2019s office later boasted that the work would lead to new technology that would \u201censure that our fleet is ready for the fights of the future.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn reality, Navatek\u2019s initial research \u201clooked like a college senior\u2019s graduation project,\u201d the executive said. \u201cSomething you go get from RadioShack.\u201d Graham\u2019s office referred questions about the quality of the work to the Navy and the university. The Office of Naval Research, which awarded the contract, did not respond to questions.\n\n\n\nA Navatek amphibious vehicle prototype heads to shore during a Marine Corps experiment in Hawaii in 2014. Lance Cpl. Aaron S. Patterson/U.S. Marine Corps\n\n\n\nBut for Congress, that lack of expertise wasn\u2019t a problem. Throughout 2019, the FBI noted, as the ensuing year\u2019s budget came together, both Graham\u2019s and Clyburn\u2019s offices took steps to make sure it included Navatek\u2019s funding.\n\n\n\nIn May 2019, Willie Lyles III, Clyburn\u2019s legislative director, alerted Navatek that the House Appropriations Committee would endorse new funding for a \u201cmodular and scalable integrated power and thermal system capable of powering a directed energy weapon system of 100 or more kilowatts,\u201d according to an email flagged by the FBI. Three days later, that exact language appeared in the House Appropriations Committee report. Lyles did not reply to a request for comment.\n\n\n\nIn September, the Senate Appropriations Committee \u2014 Graham\u2019s committee \u2014 released a budget report that set aside $9.5 million in funding for \u201cTalent and Technology for Navy Power and Energy Systems.\u201d Agents noted that Navatek may have ghostwritten the technical description that accompanied this line item because \u201can almost identical paragraph\u201d appeared in Hartman\u2019s internal spreadsheets two months before the Senate report became public.After the Senate advanced its version of the budget in the fall, Navatek dropped $4,799 to send bourbon to a handful of lawmakers, including Graham and Collins, the FBI found in company records \u2014 a likely violation of Senate gift rules. Both Collins\u2019 and Graham\u2019s offices denied receiving bourbon. Navatek later sent Clyburn a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements for $102.60.\n\n\n\n\nCongress passed the final spending bill containing $9.5 million for Navatek\u2019s pet project on Dec. 19, 2019.\n\n\n\nAt that point, Kao and other Navatek executives had not made any donations to Clyburn, Wilson or even Graham.\n\n\n\nThat would change within days of Congress passing the budget, when an executive pledged $750 to Wilson\u2019s campaign at a fundraiser held at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill watering hole for lobbyists and Hill staffers, emails show. In the following weeks, Kao and his lobbyist gave Wilson\u2019s campaign $3,500.\n\n\n\nAnd bigger checks were imminent. Kao kicked off 2020 by making plans to spend $300,000 at a slew of political fundraisers, according to text messages filed in court and a recent deposition. Navatek\u2019s lobbyists at that time were seeking private meetings with Graham, Wilson and Clyburn, where Kao planned to ask for significantly more federal funding. Kao eventually met with all three, and each asked for $100,000, he told the FBI.\n\n\n\nDuring that same period, Kao and Hartman met a top fundraiser for Collins at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. As ProPublica reported, that meeting led Kao to donate $150,000 to the pro-Collins super PAC. Kao told the FBI that the money was a bribe in exchange for the senator\u2019s support for more Navatek funding. The head of the super PAC and Collins have denied Kao\u2019s version of events.\n\n\n\nKao told the FBI it was not unusual for donations to come after the favor: \u201cWe became clever in our own right and figured out how to dangle the carrot,\u201d he wrote in a memo seen by ProPublica, \u201cuntil we saw some assurance that the Ask was in the budget.\u201d\n\n\n\nTo secure a meeting with Graham, Kao hired Michael Tongour, a veteran South Carolina lobbyist who was old law school friends with the senator and family friends with Clyburn and Wilson. Graham was up for reelection against a well-funded challenger, Jaime Harrison, and had a crowded fundraising schedule, said Tongour, but they eventually found a time.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe Graham fundraiser says that it [sic] you want to reserve a date for Senator Graham to attend a private dinner, the campaign wants to get $40,000 in contributions,\u201d Tongour wrote to Kao, Hartman and lobbyist Andy Winer, in an undated email seen by ProPublica. Winer, whom Kao described as Navatek\u2019s chief lobbyist, chimed in to say that Graham could stay only 45 minutes, and Kao replied that all they needed to hear was \u201cyes.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cThese discussions are very frank and oddly not at all awkward,\u201d Kao told the FBI. \u201cI suppose once we got that far, everyone knows the deal.\u201d\n\n\n\nA Dinner With Graham\n\n\n\nGraham showed up late to his March 3, 2020, dinner with Kao, Hartman and Tongour. A fundraiser working for Graham appeared first and accepted an envelope from Kao containing checks made out to Graham\u2019s campaign, Kao said. Kao did not know the fundraiser\u2019s name; in an FBI debrief, he simply referred to the person as the \u201cmoney man.\u201d After that person departed, Graham entered.\n\n\n\nGraham, Kao recalled to the FBI, was \u201cvery abrupt\u201d and \u201cstraight to the point\u201d: He asked how much Navatek wanted, to which they said $10 million a year for three years. Graham asked Kao to pledge $100,000 in donations in exchange for his support, Kao told the FBI.\n\n\n\nNavatek was juggling multiple proposals in South Carolina worth around $10 million, and it\u2019s not clear which one Kao was describing.\n\n\n\n\nCongress had just approved the $9.5 million for the power and energy project, but Navatek still needed the Navy to award the money in the form of a contract. The company was also about to ask Congress to fund the same project for a second year at $10.5 million. On top of that, Navatek was planning to pitch a new research proposal, at $10 million, to study the transport of supplies inland from ships using autonomous vehicles. It was another area where Navatek had \u201czero past performance,\u201d the former executive said.\n\n\n\nThe same week of the steakhouse dinner, Graham\u2019s office was working behind the scenes with Navatek and the University of South Carolina to make sure the Navy sent the first $9.5 million to the right company.\n\n\n\nA day before the dinner, an official with the Office of Naval Research emailed Graham\u2019s office to ask about the money, which \u201cthe Senator may have an interest in.\u201d Craig Abele, Graham\u2019s national security adviser, called her a few days later to confirm that Graham\u2019s office had intended the money to be awarded to the Navatek partnership, emails show. \u201cSpoke to ONR this morning,\u201d Abele wrote March 6. \u201cShould be set.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe company received the contract, which it split with the university, in July 2020.\u00a0\n\n\n\nAbele became Graham\u2019s deputy chief of staff and still holds the position for Darline. He did not reply to an email requesting comment. A Graham spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that their office had indeed added the $9.5 million to the budget at the request of the university and Navatek. The spokesperson said the research was supported by the Navy and rejected the notion that Graham was motivated by campaign cash.\n\n\n\nGraham\u2019s spokesperson said requiring a fundraising minimum for a dinner was normal practice.\n\n\n\n\u201c[It\u2019s] corruption at its best. But I am the only one rotting in prison.\u201dFormer Navatek CEO Martin Kao\n\n\n\nThe checks Kao handed over at the dinner added up to about half of the $40,000 he had agreed to raise for the dinner, according to Tongour. The rest came in May, campaign records show.\n\n\n\n\u201cMy understanding at the time was that the contributions associated with the event were lawful political contributions,\u201d Winer said. \u201cI never advised Kao to make a political contribution in exchange for official action. I never participated in, witnessed or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution.\u201d\n\n\n\nAfter Kao\u2019s 2020 indictment, the University of South Carolina broke off the partnership. \u201cUniversity officials were not aware of any political contributions from Navatek,\u201d Jeff Stensland, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email. \u201cOur sole objective in partnering with them was to expand our research enterprise.\u201d\n\n\n\nOne week after the dinner, on March 10, a University of South Carolina lobbyist sent written requests to Graham\u2019s office for $20.5 million in appropriations: $10.5 million to continue Navatek\u2019s power and energy research and $10 million for its new autonomous vehicle research.\n\n\n\nTongour confirmed many elements of Kao\u2019s story. In a recent interview with ProPublica and subsequent emails, he remembered Kao giving the envelope full of checks to Graham\u2019s fundraiser and even agreed that Graham kept the meeting short. \u201cI don\u2019t recall that he stayed more than 30 minutes,\u201d Tongour said in an email. \u201cCertainly not for appetizers, entr\u00e9e, and dessert.\u201d\n\n\n\nBut he denied Kao\u2019s most significant claim: that Graham and Navatek struck an explicit, potentially illegal deal for contracts.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI would remember that forever,\u201d Tongour said. Graham supported Navatek\u2019s requests, he said, because they were good for the state. \u201cIf I had seen that kind of quid pro quo, I would have quit earlier.\u201d Tongour fired Navatek as a client later that year, immediately after Kao\u2019s arrest.\n\n\n\nNavatek considered Graham its chief patron in South Carolina, internal records show, just as it viewed Collins in Maine. But the company also wanted support in the House.\n\n\n\nFor that, Navatek turned to Clyburn, a member of Democratic party leadership and one of the most powerful figures in Congress. Agents found Navatek emails setting a meeting with Clyburn for early March. The goal, Kao said, was to make sure that the House draft of the budget \u201cmirrored\u201d whatever Graham inserted in the Senate version.\n\n\n\nOver a meal, Clyburn asked Kao how much he was donating to Graham and then asked for the same amount, $100,000, Kao told the FBI.\n\n\n\nThe FBI tallied $20,000 in contributions that Kao and his family members made to Clyburn a few days after their scheduled meeting. A month later, Hartman arranged for a $10,000 gift to Clyburn\u2019s alma mater, South Carolina State University, according to an email seen by ProPublica. Hartman noted it was \u201cCongressman Clyburn\u2019s favorite school.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe spokesperson for Clyburn confirmed the dinner occurred but did not respond to questions about what was discussed.\n\n\n\nKao and Hartman struck a similar bargain with Wilson, Kao told the FBI, at a private lunch he secured by donating to his campaign. The FBI pulled records of $3,500 in donations Kao and Tongour made in late 2019 and early 2020.\n\n\n\nWilson has an influential role on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes defense spending. Wilson was \u201cvery clear and knew what the ask was,\u201d Kao told the FBI. He wanted however much Clyburn was getting in campaign contributions in exchange for his support, Kao said.\n\n\n\nTongour denied this. \u201cThere was no \u2018pay to play\u2019 with Joe Wilson or his staff either,\u201d he wrote in an email, adding that he donated because Wilson \u201cis a friend and I want to see him re-elected.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao claimed to the FBI that he paid for meals with all three politicians, but campaign finance records appear to show the lawmakers\u2019 campaigns picked up the check.\n\n\n\nBy August 2020, Hartman had gotten word that Graham\u2019s and Wilson\u2019s committees would each support part of the company\u2019s requests, internal company records show. Clyburn was not on key committees while he was a party leader. In one of his myriad spreadsheets, Hartman projected that the final budget could include up to $15.5 million of the $20.5 million the company had lobbied for.\n\n\n\n\nKao told agents he was gearing up to make more significant donations to Graham, Clyburn and Wilson by the end of the year. Instead, on Sept. 30, 2020, he was arrested.\n\n\n\nKao reflected on his time at Navatek in a deposition taken last month inside a federal prison. The company\u2019s founder has sued Kao, saying his stewardship defrauded Navatek of millions.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s nothing more than government contracting done through placating senior appropriation members for contracts,\u201d Kao said. \u201cThe whole thing is a grand lie.\u201d\n\n\n\nAn Arrest, a Lifeboat\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s arrest plunged Navatek into disarray. Federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding a federal loan program; not long after, he was also charged with making illegal donations to the Collins campaign and super PAC. Lobbyists, universities and congressional offices abruptly cut off contact. \u201cDon\u2019t call us,\u201d one congressional office told an executive, he later testified.\n\n\n\nThe Collins campaign said it disgorged Kao\u2019s contribution. Yet the senator, facing a tight reelection bid, has had to field questions following the ProPublica report about her support for Navatek and why the super PAC supporting her accepted the $150,000 donation from the shell company in the first place.\n\n\n\nAs Navatek sank, Hartman began building himself a lifeboat. In 2021, he and Knight started a new military research company headquartered in South Carolina called Integer Technologies. Integer\u2019s first project was one that Navatek had brokered with Graham.\n\n\n\nHartman didn\u2019t face any criminal charges at the time and left Navatek largely unscathed. He would later settle a civil lawsuit brought by his former employer, which contended he played a role in Kao\u2019s campaign finance and loan fraud schemes, for $425,000. He admitted no wrongdoing.\n\n\n\nIn September 2024, FBI agents flew to Hawaii for what would be their final interview with Kao. They pressed him for details about what happened in South Carolina, quizzing him on his dinner with Graham and a second in-person meeting he said he had with Clyburn. Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.\n\n\n\nAs the year came to a close, FBI agent Michelle Ball felt she had enough material to move forward. The FBI had \u201cuncovered a lengthy history\u201d of a government contractor making donations \u201cin exchange for government contracts,\u201d she wrote in a Dec. 9, 2024, memo viewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\nIn federal corruption probes, agents often begin by focusing on lower-level targets with a goal of working their way up to more prominent figures. Ball named Hartman; his business partner, Knight; and their company, Integer, as the formal subjects of the probe, as they prepared to potentially issue subpoenas and gather more evidence. They had Graham, Clyburn and Wilson in their sights. Ball devoted entire sections of the memo to detailing the lawmakers\u2019 conduct. And she flagged the case as a sensitive matter that might implicate politicians in the future.\n\n\n\nIn the summer of 2024, Kate Fifield, a prosecutor in the Justice Department\u2019s anti-corruption section, had been assigned to join the case. Fifield was wrapping up a high-profile prosecution of a retired Navy admiral who traded a government contract for a future job. Turning her attention to Kao, she and the FBI agents weighed their options. They considered getting high-level approval to deploy undercover agents. Proving an exchange of cash for favors often requires the kind of inconvertible evidence that undercover recordings can provide.\n\n\n\n\nBut before the investigation took flight, the new Trump administration began to demolish the Justice Department. The president\u2019s handpicked leaders ordered prosecutors to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, triggering a wave of resignations in the Public Integrity Section where Fifield worked, and revoked the section\u2019s authority to bring new cases.\n\n\n\nThen Trump\u2019s FBI director, Kash Patel, began to purge the anti-corruption unit in the Washington D.C., field office, where many agents had investigated Trump.\n\n\n\nBall was fired in October 2025. Kevin Gounaud, another agent who had been working with her on the investigation, was pushed out in early 2026. Through their lawyer, the agents declined to comment.\n\n\n\nThe corruption investigation, just launched, suddenly went dark.\n\n\n\n\nRead More\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe White House referred ProPublica\u2019s questions to the FBI and DOJ.\u00a0\n\n\n\nThe Department of Justice didn\u2019t respond to detailed questions about the investigation.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\u201cUnder President Trump, the Justice Department is rooting out the weaponization, corruption, and institutional rot that ran rampant under Joe Biden\u2019s two-tiered system of justice,\u201d DOJ spokesperson Audrey Cook said.\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s claims are \u201chalf baked\u201d and \u201cmisleading,\u201d FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said. \u201cAdditionally, as we have said repeatedly, personnel are only removed at this FBI if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.\u201d\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Integer has rapidly expanded. Last year, it reported $81 million in contracts and announced that number would climb to $375 million by 2030. The company inked partnership deals with universities in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Mississippi. The University of South Carolina called its partnership with the firm a \u201cmodel for public-private success.\u201dThe company continues to forge ties with powerful politicians. In late 2024, Hartman posted a photo of himself with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on his LinkedIn. \u201cIt was great to visit with the Speaker of the House today,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s good to know there are people in positions of power who seem to really care for the people they serve.\u201d Johnson\u2019s office did not reply to an email requesting comment.\u00a0\n\n\n\nThe occasion was a new research partnership in Louisiana. Hartman thanked his lobbyist for making it happen." ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1792516515.750881", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-10-20T19:22:10.321691+00:00", "status": "succeeded" }, { "cmd": [ "/app/node_modules/readability-extractor/readability-extractor", "/tmp/tmp3_41_y0u", "https://www.propublica.org/article/navatek-lindsey-graham-jim-clyburn-fbi-anti-corruption-bribery" ], "cmd_version": "0.0.11", "end_ts": "2026-10-20T19:31:46.292723+00:00", "index_texts": [ "Reporting Highlights\n\n\n\n\nPay for Play: A Hawaiian naval firm filled South Carolina politicians\u2019 campaign coffers with cash and won federal contracts in the state.\n\n\n\nBig Players: Lindsey Graham and James Clyburn, two major forces in South Carolina, helped steer federal money to Navatek.\n\n\n\nQuestionable Merit: The contracts\u2019 effectiveness was dubious. \u201cThe whole thing is a grand lie,\u201d said the former CEO.\n\n\n\n\nThese highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.\n\n\n\n\n\nOn March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham\u2019s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.\n\n\n\nNavatek\u2019s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.\n\n\n\n\u201cShoot all he has to really do is stop by and say \u2018yes,\u2019\u201d Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. \u201cThat should only take a minute and he\u2019s on his way. We don\u2019t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.\u201d\n\n\n\nAt the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the \u201cyes\u201d he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek\u2019s way in his native South Carolina, Kao later recounted to the FBI. In exchange, he said, Graham asked Kao to pledge a total of $100,000 to his reelection campaign.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cPaper Trail\u201d Podcast\n\n\n\nHear the reporters discuss their reporting on the FBI on \u201dPaper Trail.\u201d\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\n\n\n\nIn early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham\u2019s steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.\n\n\n\nThe scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said \u2014 in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state\u2019s top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.\n\n\n\nKao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: \u201cThis is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,\u201d Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s admissions would constitute a vast criminal bribery scheme if they could be proved in court \u2014 a challenge, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult to win corruption cases. Kao himself posed another hurdle. He was facing prison for fraud and campaign finance violations and was speaking to the FBI in the hopes of reducing his sentence.\n\n\n\nBut the FBI agents who took Kao\u2019s confession \u2014 two experienced anti-corruption investigators \u2014 could see that much of it lined up with a trove of records they had seized from Navatek. They forged ahead. The FBI took the formal step of naming two former Navatek executives who had worked with Kao as subjects of a bribery investigation. The agency did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao. The agents indicated to their superiors that the lawmakers could become subjects in the future, according to records viewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\n\nThe details of this investigation have not previously been reported.\n\n\n\nPresident Donald Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately gutted the specialized FBI and Department of Justice teams dedicated to taking on public corruption \u2014 an act of revenge for having previously investigated him. The two experienced agents on the case were swept up in the purge, and the career prosecutor assisting them quit after Trump appointees forbid the DOJ\u2019s anti-corruption section from filing any new cases. Today, there is no one left to look into Kao\u2019s explosive allegations, as the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption. The case is dead.\n\n\n\nProPublica has unearthed the investigation by reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, internal company emails, evidence the FBI used to vet Kao\u2019s claims and dozens of interviews with people who saw how Navatek operated, including an eyewitness to Graham and Kao\u2019s secret steakhouse dinner.\n\n\n\nThis story is part of a series based on our reporting. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had probed the conduct of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who steered millions in government funding toward Navatek while Kao gave her illegal campaign donations. Collins denied wrongdoing and dismissed Kao as a \u201cconvicted liar.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao is indeed the only person involved to serve prison time. He pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign donations and a loan fraud scheme in 2022. In 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months in prison.\n\n\n\nGraham died at 71 earlier this year. His sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill his seat, retained most of his senior staff, including those who dealt with Navatek. She even took up some of his committee assignments, including appropriations. Darline Graham is running for a full term in office this November.\n\n\n\nClyburn, 86, is one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. He is widely credited with tipping the scales for Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Wilson remains influential on national defense spending from his senior perch on the Armed Services Committee.\n\n\n\nJames Clyburn, left, and Lindsey Graham speak during an event at the White House to celebrate the 2023-24 University of South Carolina Gamecocks NCAA women\u2019s basketball championship team. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images\n\n\n\n\u201cWhatever a donor may think or say, a donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor\u2019s request,\u201d Jami LaRue, Clyburn\u2019s communications director, wrote in response to detailed questions. \u201cThe Congressman has always striven to assist the University of South Carolina and all of the colleges and universities in his district when called upon to further their important missions. The crimes and lies of an imprisoned fraudster will not cause the Congressman to waver in his support for these fine institutions.\u201d\n\n\n\nDavid Snider, Wilson\u2019s communications director, did not address a detailed list of questions sent by ProPublica. \u201cCongressman Wilson does and has always abided by campaign donation regulations set forth by the Federal Election Commission,\u201d Snider said in an email.\n\n\n\nIn an emailed statement, Taylor Reidy, who was Lindsey Graham\u2019s communications director and now holds the same post for his sister, wrote that \u201cany allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior or wrongdoing by the late Senator Lindsey Graham or his staff are simply false.\u201d She said the accusations were the \u201cravings of a convicted felon\u201d and that her office was never contacted by the FBI about the matter. After Kao\u2019s arrest, they disgorged his donations, she added.\n\n\n\n\nThe two executives who were subjects of the FBI investigation, Duke Hartman and Joshua Knight, were never charged. Hartman, the other executive at the dinner meeting with Graham, is now the CEO of a new naval research company called Integer Technologies that he co-founded with Knight after Kao\u2019s arrest. Integer was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing government contractors in the country. It also became the ultimate beneficiary of the Graham dinner meeting, picking up the contract Graham allegedly agreed to facilitate that night.\n\n\n\nHartman and Knight did not respond to detailed requests for comment.\n\n\n\n\u201c[It\u2019s] corruption at its best,\u201d Kao wrote to ProPublica from federal detention in South Dakota, before cutting off contact. \u201cBut I am the only one rotting in prison.\u201d\n\n\n\nSmall Company, Big Ambitions\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s dinner with Graham was part of his grandiose plan to make Navatek a major defense contractor.\n\n\n\nHe had become the CEO at an uncertain moment in the company\u2019s history. Founded in Hawaii in the 1970s, the company originally thrived on a close relationship with the state\u2019s powerful senior senator, Daniel Inouye. When Kao assumed ownership in 2019, it had been several years since Inouye had died, and Navatek was in need of a new patron in Washington.\n\n\n\nAt times, Kao hardly seemed the person to pull this off. He had started out as the company\u2019s CFO and was openly uninterested in its technology. He told bombastic lies about his personal life. Former employees said he regaled them with tales of selling newspapers for members of the Bloods and Crips street gangs as a youth. In a deposition, Kao later admitted that wasn\u2019t true.\n\n\n\nBut what he lacked in engineering chops he made up with ambition. Once, Kao held a company town hall using a map of the U.S. dotted with future Navatek offices as his backdrop, a former employee recalled. \u201cHe would talk about how we\u2019re a $10 million company, and in the next three years, we\u2019re going to be a billion-dollar company,\u201d said a former engineer. \u201cHe was an absolute megalomaniac.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao hatched a plan to expand Navatek\u2019s presence across the country, making new friends in Congress along the way. He courted politicians using something he called \u201cthe method,\u201d as ProPublica detailed in September.\n\n\n\nNavatek would open an office in the state or district of a powerful member of Congress and partner with a local university to concoct a proposal for federally funded research. Then, aided by a well-connected lobbyist and the sheen of credibility from its association with the university, Navatek would approach the member for federal research funding.\n\n\n\nKao told the FBI he would strike deals in small, face-to-face meetings with the members or their trusted staff. Navatek \u2014 through executives, family members and lobbyists \u2014 would make generous campaign donations. In exchange, the member would add detailed language to the defense budget to fund the company\u2019s work.\n\n\n\nThat legislative language would not name the company. But it would describe specific work that Navatek was already planning to do behind the scenes, making it the only logical choice for the eventual government contract. The lawmakers\u2019 staff would also backchannel with the Navy after the bill was passed to make sure contracting offices knew to direct the money to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show \u2014 even though the contracts were in theory competitive.\n\n\n\n\nKao \u201cwanted to build a company as big as he could as fast as he could,\u201d a former executive later testified in court. For a while, he succeeded. Under Kao, Navatek went from having to \u201crebuild,\u201d as the executive put it, to winning $40.7 million in new government contracts in 2020.\n\n\n\nHartman, the other Navatek executive who went to dinner with Graham, was in charge of maintaining friendly ties in Congress while tracking the millions of dollars the company had requested in research funds. He kept careful tabs on the company\u2019s progress using dozens of color-coded spreadsheets. \u201cIf anyone knows the impropriety of the business model, it\u2019s him,\u201d Kao told the FBI, referring to Hartman.\n\n\n\nLater, these spreadsheets provided the FBI a detailed picture of which congressional offices worked closest with Navatek. In the tables devoted to South Carolina, Navatek denoted Graham as a \u201ckey supporter.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe company primarily targeted lawmakers from smaller states who sat on appropriations committees, like Collins, Kao explained to the FBI, because they wielded huge power over the budget while having fewer \u201cconstituents to \u2018feed.\u2019\u201d\n\n\n\nThe senior senator from South Carolina was another prime target. \u201cYou can get access to Lindsey Graham,\u201d Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, said in an interview.\n\n\n\nKao, Hartman and other Navatek executives approached the offices of Graham, Clyburn and Wilson \u2014 all powerful members of the South Carolina delegation \u2014 in the beginning of 2019. The company had recruited the University of South Carolina for a joint research project, and together they asked the lawmakers to find $9.5 million to fund the work. If it succeeded, Navatek planned to ask Congress to re-up the funding for two more years as well as green-light two more projects, internal company records show, for a total of up to $90 million in South Carolina alone.\n\n\n\nYet Navatek had \u201czero people\u201d capable of doing the research it was pitching, said a former executive with direct knowledge of the work.\n\n\n\nIts $9.5 million \u201cpower and energy\u201d proposal promised cutting-edge research on how to distribute the limited power on board a ship between multiple energy-intense systems, like radars, lasers and rail guns. Graham\u2019s office later boasted that the work would lead to new technology that would \u201censure that our fleet is ready for the fights of the future.\u201d\n\n\n\nIn reality, Navatek\u2019s initial research \u201clooked like a college senior\u2019s graduation project,\u201d the executive said. \u201cSomething you go get from RadioShack.\u201d Graham\u2019s office referred questions about the quality of the work to the Navy and the university. The Office of Naval Research, which awarded the contract, did not respond to questions.\n\n\n\nA Navatek amphibious vehicle prototype heads to shore during a Marine Corps experiment in Hawaii in 2014. Lance Cpl. Aaron S. Patterson/U.S. Marine Corps\n\n\n\nBut for Congress, that lack of expertise wasn\u2019t a problem. Throughout 2019, the FBI noted, as the ensuing year\u2019s budget came together, both Graham\u2019s and Clyburn\u2019s offices took steps to make sure it included Navatek\u2019s funding.\n\n\n\nIn May 2019, Willie Lyles III, Clyburn\u2019s legislative director, alerted Navatek that the House Appropriations Committee would endorse new funding for a \u201cmodular and scalable integrated power and thermal system capable of powering a directed energy weapon system of 100 or more kilowatts,\u201d according to an email flagged by the FBI. Three days later, that exact language appeared in the House Appropriations Committee report. Lyles did not reply to a request for comment.\n\n\n\nIn September, the Senate Appropriations Committee \u2014 Graham\u2019s committee \u2014 released a budget report that set aside $9.5 million in funding for \u201cTalent and Technology for Navy Power and Energy Systems.\u201d Agents noted that Navatek may have ghostwritten the technical description that accompanied this line item because \u201can almost identical paragraph\u201d appeared in Hartman\u2019s internal spreadsheets two months before the Senate report became public.After the Senate advanced its version of the budget in the fall, Navatek dropped $4,799 to send bourbon to a handful of lawmakers, including Graham and Collins, the FBI found in company records \u2014 a likely violation of Senate gift rules. Both Collins\u2019 and Graham\u2019s offices denied receiving bourbon. Navatek later sent Clyburn a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements for $102.60.\n\n\n\n\nCongress passed the final spending bill containing $9.5 million for Navatek\u2019s pet project on Dec. 19, 2019.\n\n\n\nAt that point, Kao and other Navatek executives had not made any donations to Clyburn, Wilson or even Graham.\n\n\n\nThat would change within days of Congress passing the budget, when an executive pledged $750 to Wilson\u2019s campaign at a fundraiser held at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill watering hole for lobbyists and Hill staffers, emails show. In the following weeks, Kao and his lobbyist gave Wilson\u2019s campaign $3,500.\n\n\n\nAnd bigger checks were imminent. Kao kicked off 2020 by making plans to spend $300,000 at a slew of political fundraisers, according to text messages filed in court and a recent deposition. Navatek\u2019s lobbyists at that time were seeking private meetings with Graham, Wilson and Clyburn, where Kao planned to ask for significantly more federal funding. Kao eventually met with all three, and each asked for $100,000, he told the FBI.\n\n\n\nDuring that same period, Kao and Hartman met a top fundraiser for Collins at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. As ProPublica reported, that meeting led Kao to donate $150,000 to the pro-Collins super PAC. Kao told the FBI that the money was a bribe in exchange for the senator\u2019s support for more Navatek funding. The head of the super PAC and Collins have denied Kao\u2019s version of events.\n\n\n\nKao told the FBI it was not unusual for donations to come after the favor: \u201cWe became clever in our own right and figured out how to dangle the carrot,\u201d he wrote in a memo seen by ProPublica, \u201cuntil we saw some assurance that the Ask was in the budget.\u201d\n\n\n\nTo secure a meeting with Graham, Kao hired Michael Tongour, a veteran South Carolina lobbyist who was old law school friends with the senator and family friends with Clyburn and Wilson. Graham was up for reelection against a well-funded challenger, Jaime Harrison, and had a crowded fundraising schedule, said Tongour, but they eventually found a time.\n\n\n\n\u201cThe Graham fundraiser says that it [sic] you want to reserve a date for Senator Graham to attend a private dinner, the campaign wants to get $40,000 in contributions,\u201d Tongour wrote to Kao, Hartman and lobbyist Andy Winer, in an undated email seen by ProPublica. Winer, whom Kao described as Navatek\u2019s chief lobbyist, chimed in to say that Graham could stay only 45 minutes, and Kao replied that all they needed to hear was \u201cyes.\u201d\n\n\n\n\u201cThese discussions are very frank and oddly not at all awkward,\u201d Kao told the FBI. \u201cI suppose once we got that far, everyone knows the deal.\u201d\n\n\n\nA Dinner With Graham\n\n\n\nGraham showed up late to his March 3, 2020, dinner with Kao, Hartman and Tongour. A fundraiser working for Graham appeared first and accepted an envelope from Kao containing checks made out to Graham\u2019s campaign, Kao said. Kao did not know the fundraiser\u2019s name; in an FBI debrief, he simply referred to the person as the \u201cmoney man.\u201d After that person departed, Graham entered.\n\n\n\nGraham, Kao recalled to the FBI, was \u201cvery abrupt\u201d and \u201cstraight to the point\u201d: He asked how much Navatek wanted, to which they said $10 million a year for three years. Graham asked Kao to pledge $100,000 in donations in exchange for his support, Kao told the FBI.\n\n\n\nNavatek was juggling multiple proposals in South Carolina worth around $10 million, and it\u2019s not clear which one Kao was describing.\n\n\n\n\nCongress had just approved the $9.5 million for the power and energy project, but Navatek still needed the Navy to award the money in the form of a contract. The company was also about to ask Congress to fund the same project for a second year at $10.5 million. On top of that, Navatek was planning to pitch a new research proposal, at $10 million, to study the transport of supplies inland from ships using autonomous vehicles. It was another area where Navatek had \u201czero past performance,\u201d the former executive said.\n\n\n\nThe same week of the steakhouse dinner, Graham\u2019s office was working behind the scenes with Navatek and the University of South Carolina to make sure the Navy sent the first $9.5 million to the right company.\n\n\n\nA day before the dinner, an official with the Office of Naval Research emailed Graham\u2019s office to ask about the money, which \u201cthe Senator may have an interest in.\u201d Craig Abele, Graham\u2019s national security adviser, called her a few days later to confirm that Graham\u2019s office had intended the money to be awarded to the Navatek partnership, emails show. \u201cSpoke to ONR this morning,\u201d Abele wrote March 6. \u201cShould be set.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe company received the contract, which it split with the university, in July 2020.\u00a0\n\n\n\nAbele became Graham\u2019s deputy chief of staff and still holds the position for Darline. He did not reply to an email requesting comment. A Graham spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that their office had indeed added the $9.5 million to the budget at the request of the university and Navatek. The spokesperson said the research was supported by the Navy and rejected the notion that Graham was motivated by campaign cash.\n\n\n\nGraham\u2019s spokesperson said requiring a fundraising minimum for a dinner was normal practice.\n\n\n\n\u201c[It\u2019s] corruption at its best. But I am the only one rotting in prison.\u201dFormer Navatek CEO Martin Kao\n\n\n\nThe checks Kao handed over at the dinner added up to about half of the $40,000 he had agreed to raise for the dinner, according to Tongour. The rest came in May, campaign records show.\n\n\n\n\u201cMy understanding at the time was that the contributions associated with the event were lawful political contributions,\u201d Winer said. \u201cI never advised Kao to make a political contribution in exchange for official action. I never participated in, witnessed or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution.\u201d\n\n\n\nAfter Kao\u2019s 2020 indictment, the University of South Carolina broke off the partnership. \u201cUniversity officials were not aware of any political contributions from Navatek,\u201d Jeff Stensland, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email. \u201cOur sole objective in partnering with them was to expand our research enterprise.\u201d\n\n\n\nOne week after the dinner, on March 10, a University of South Carolina lobbyist sent written requests to Graham\u2019s office for $20.5 million in appropriations: $10.5 million to continue Navatek\u2019s power and energy research and $10 million for its new autonomous vehicle research.\n\n\n\nTongour confirmed many elements of Kao\u2019s story. In a recent interview with ProPublica and subsequent emails, he remembered Kao giving the envelope full of checks to Graham\u2019s fundraiser and even agreed that Graham kept the meeting short. \u201cI don\u2019t recall that he stayed more than 30 minutes,\u201d Tongour said in an email. \u201cCertainly not for appetizers, entr\u00e9e, and dessert.\u201d\n\n\n\nBut he denied Kao\u2019s most significant claim: that Graham and Navatek struck an explicit, potentially illegal deal for contracts.\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI would remember that forever,\u201d Tongour said. Graham supported Navatek\u2019s requests, he said, because they were good for the state. \u201cIf I had seen that kind of quid pro quo, I would have quit earlier.\u201d Tongour fired Navatek as a client later that year, immediately after Kao\u2019s arrest.\n\n\n\nNavatek considered Graham its chief patron in South Carolina, internal records show, just as it viewed Collins in Maine. But the company also wanted support in the House.\n\n\n\nFor that, Navatek turned to Clyburn, a member of Democratic party leadership and one of the most powerful figures in Congress. Agents found Navatek emails setting a meeting with Clyburn for early March. The goal, Kao said, was to make sure that the House draft of the budget \u201cmirrored\u201d whatever Graham inserted in the Senate version.\n\n\n\nOver a meal, Clyburn asked Kao how much he was donating to Graham and then asked for the same amount, $100,000, Kao told the FBI.\n\n\n\nThe FBI tallied $20,000 in contributions that Kao and his family members made to Clyburn a few days after their scheduled meeting. A month later, Hartman arranged for a $10,000 gift to Clyburn\u2019s alma mater, South Carolina State University, according to an email seen by ProPublica. Hartman noted it was \u201cCongressman Clyburn\u2019s favorite school.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe spokesperson for Clyburn confirmed the dinner occurred but did not respond to questions about what was discussed.\n\n\n\nKao and Hartman struck a similar bargain with Wilson, Kao told the FBI, at a private lunch he secured by donating to his campaign. The FBI pulled records of $3,500 in donations Kao and Tongour made in late 2019 and early 2020.\n\n\n\nWilson has an influential role on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes defense spending. Wilson was \u201cvery clear and knew what the ask was,\u201d Kao told the FBI. He wanted however much Clyburn was getting in campaign contributions in exchange for his support, Kao said.\n\n\n\nTongour denied this. \u201cThere was no \u2018pay to play\u2019 with Joe Wilson or his staff either,\u201d he wrote in an email, adding that he donated because Wilson \u201cis a friend and I want to see him re-elected.\u201d\n\n\n\nKao claimed to the FBI that he paid for meals with all three politicians, but campaign finance records appear to show the lawmakers\u2019 campaigns picked up the check.\n\n\n\nBy August 2020, Hartman had gotten word that Graham\u2019s and Wilson\u2019s committees would each support part of the company\u2019s requests, internal company records show. Clyburn was not on key committees while he was a party leader. In one of his myriad spreadsheets, Hartman projected that the final budget could include up to $15.5 million of the $20.5 million the company had lobbied for.\n\n\n\n\nKao told agents he was gearing up to make more significant donations to Graham, Clyburn and Wilson by the end of the year. Instead, on Sept. 30, 2020, he was arrested.\n\n\n\nKao reflected on his time at Navatek in a deposition taken last month inside a federal prison. The company\u2019s founder has sued Kao, saying his stewardship defrauded Navatek of millions.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s nothing more than government contracting done through placating senior appropriation members for contracts,\u201d Kao said. \u201cThe whole thing is a grand lie.\u201d\n\n\n\nAn Arrest, a Lifeboat\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s arrest plunged Navatek into disarray. Federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding a federal loan program; not long after, he was also charged with making illegal donations to the Collins campaign and super PAC. Lobbyists, universities and congressional offices abruptly cut off contact. \u201cDon\u2019t call us,\u201d one congressional office told an executive, he later testified.\n\n\n\nThe Collins campaign said it disgorged Kao\u2019s contribution. Yet the senator, facing a tight reelection bid, has had to field questions following the ProPublica report about her support for Navatek and why the super PAC supporting her accepted the $150,000 donation from the shell company in the first place.\n\n\n\nAs Navatek sank, Hartman began building himself a lifeboat. In 2021, he and Knight started a new military research company headquartered in South Carolina called Integer Technologies. Integer\u2019s first project was one that Navatek had brokered with Graham.\n\n\n\nHartman didn\u2019t face any criminal charges at the time and left Navatek largely unscathed. He would later settle a civil lawsuit brought by his former employer, which contended he played a role in Kao\u2019s campaign finance and loan fraud schemes, for $425,000. He admitted no wrongdoing.\n\n\n\nIn September 2024, FBI agents flew to Hawaii for what would be their final interview with Kao. They pressed him for details about what happened in South Carolina, quizzing him on his dinner with Graham and a second in-person meeting he said he had with Clyburn. Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.\n\n\n\nAs the year came to a close, FBI agent Michelle Ball felt she had enough material to move forward. The FBI had \u201cuncovered a lengthy history\u201d of a government contractor making donations \u201cin exchange for government contracts,\u201d she wrote in a Dec. 9, 2024, memo viewed by ProPublica.\n\n\n\nIn federal corruption probes, agents often begin by focusing on lower-level targets with a goal of working their way up to more prominent figures. Ball named Hartman; his business partner, Knight; and their company, Integer, as the formal subjects of the probe, as they prepared to potentially issue subpoenas and gather more evidence. They had Graham, Clyburn and Wilson in their sights. Ball devoted entire sections of the memo to detailing the lawmakers\u2019 conduct. And she flagged the case as a sensitive matter that might implicate politicians in the future.\n\n\n\nIn the summer of 2024, Kate Fifield, a prosecutor in the Justice Department\u2019s anti-corruption section, had been assigned to join the case. Fifield was wrapping up a high-profile prosecution of a retired Navy admiral who traded a government contract for a future job. Turning her attention to Kao, she and the FBI agents weighed their options. They considered getting high-level approval to deploy undercover agents. Proving an exchange of cash for favors often requires the kind of inconvertible evidence that undercover recordings can provide.\n\n\n\n\nBut before the investigation took flight, the new Trump administration began to demolish the Justice Department. The president\u2019s handpicked leaders ordered prosecutors to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, triggering a wave of resignations in the Public Integrity Section where Fifield worked, and revoked the section\u2019s authority to bring new cases.\n\n\n\nThen Trump\u2019s FBI director, Kash Patel, began to purge the anti-corruption unit in the Washington D.C., field office, where many agents had investigated Trump.\n\n\n\nBall was fired in October 2025. Kevin Gounaud, another agent who had been working with her on the investigation, was pushed out in early 2026. Through their lawyer, the agents declined to comment.\n\n\n\nThe corruption investigation, just launched, suddenly went dark.\n\n\n\n\nRead More\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe White House referred ProPublica\u2019s questions to the FBI and DOJ.\u00a0\n\n\n\nThe Department of Justice didn\u2019t respond to detailed questions about the investigation.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\u201cUnder President Trump, the Justice Department is rooting out the weaponization, corruption, and institutional rot that ran rampant under Joe Biden\u2019s two-tiered system of justice,\u201d DOJ spokesperson Audrey Cook said.\n\n\n\nKao\u2019s claims are \u201chalf baked\u201d and \u201cmisleading,\u201d FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said. \u201cAdditionally, as we have said repeatedly, personnel are only removed at this FBI if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.\u201d\n\n\n\nMeanwhile, Integer has rapidly expanded. Last year, it reported $81 million in contracts and announced that number would climb to $375 million by 2030. The company inked partnership deals with universities in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Mississippi. The University of South Carolina called its partnership with the firm a \u201cmodel for public-private success.\u201dThe company continues to forge ties with powerful politicians. In late 2024, Hartman posted a photo of himself with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on his LinkedIn. \u201cIt was great to visit with the Speaker of the House today,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s good to know there are people in positions of power who seem to really care for the people they serve.\u201d Johnson\u2019s office did not reply to an email requesting comment.\u00a0\n\n\n\nThe occasion was a new research partnership in Louisiana. 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