The F.B.I. in 2025 shut down an inquiry into allegations that a political adviser to Senator Susan Collins had participated in a scheme to funnel illegal campaign contributions from a defense contractor seeking lucrative federal contracts, current and former officials said.
The bureau began investigating the matter under the Biden administration, after Martin Kao, the chief executive of Navatek, a military contractor in Hawaii, said he had discussed circumventing campaign finance laws with a political adviser to Ms. Collins, Republican of Maine. Mr. Kao is now serving an 87-month prison sentence for wire fraud, money laundering and bank fraud, some of which related to a separate scheme to defraud the government of pandemic aid money.
The inquiry was closed under the Trump administration last year because senior bureau officials questioned the veracity of Mr. Kao’s account, which he began offering around the time he pleaded guilty in 2022.
Current and former officials familiar with the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive inquiry, said agents did not uncover much evidence to corroborate Mr. Kao’s claims against the senator and her advisers including Scott Reed, a fund-raiser for Ms. Collins. But they acknowledged that it was possible more could have surfaced if the investigation had developed further.
The disclosure of the inquiry and its closing came in the final weeks of a midterm election in which Ms. Collins is in a tight race that could help decide control of the Senate. It prompted accusations that the F.B.I.’s decision to shut down the investigation last year was influenced by political considerations — safeguarding a critical seat that could decide which party controls the Senate.
Annie Clark, Ms. Collins’s deputy chief of staff, described the allegations against the senator and her advisers as “categorically false.” In a lengthy social media post on Tuesday morning, she said that her campaign “cooperated fully with the F.B.I. throughout the investigation, producing all of the documents it requested and serving as fact witnesses in official settings.”
“As Martin Kao was awaiting sentencing, he began making outlandish charges about the Collins office, deflecting blame from himself and placing it on Senator Collins,” she wrote, adding: “The FBI and the Court obviously did not believe Kao.”
In an email to ProPublica, which earlier reported the nature of the investigation, Ms. Clark added that the campaign ultimately returned the money. The committee sent the donations to a group that was rebuilding a school in Frenchville, Maine, that burned down in 2021, according to a person with knowledge of the move.
In President Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has scuttled the main unit responsible for investigating public corruption, while dropping investigations against Republicans and Trump allies, including Eric Adams, the former mayor of New York.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, also fired many agents in a public corruption unit at the Washington field office that had handled the Kao inquiry who had gone on to work for the special counsel Jack Smith, including one of the agents who had investigated Mr. Kao.
Ms. Collins, a moderate, is not close to Mr. Trump and has often sought to distance herself from some of his policies.
Mr. Kao told investigators that executives with his company had met in 2019 with Mr. Reed, who asked them for a large donation even though federal law prohibits direct contributions from federal contractors, according to ProPublica’s account, which was later confirmed by two former officials.
Mr. Kao said he was willing to do so provided Ms. Collins’s team could ensure the company received millions in naval contracts in Maine. As a workaround, Mr. Kao created a shell company and sent a $150,000 check to a super PAC associated with Ms. Collins, ProPublica reported.
Shortly afterward, Novatek received an $8 million contract for a boat hull research project. Ms. Collins visited the company’s offices in Maine to celebrate the deal, posting a photograph of herself on Facebook holding a model boat and standing next to Mr. Kao.
Ms. Collins, 73, faces what is arguably the toughest re-election campaign of her three-decade career as a Republican representing a blue state.
Her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, the former speaker of Maine’s State Senate, seized on the disclosure of the F.B.I. investigation to accuse Ms. Collins of corruption and to cast Mr. Trump as her political wingman.
“Susan Collins delivered millions in taxpayer dollars for a corrupt donor bankrolling her campaign, and then Donald Trump helped her cover it up,” he said in a fund-raising email sent on Tuesday.
Ben Williamson, a spokesman for the bureau, said it had investigated claims against Ms. Collins and “found nothing” indicating that the senator or her campaign had done anything illegal. “Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.”
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