PRESS RELEASE
HUFFPOST: Collins Faced An FBI Investigation Over Dark Money. It’s Still Flowing To Her Campaign.
Campaign Legal Center: “That’s dangerous from a corruption perspective because that could very well be a situation like what we see with Susan Collins and Navatek.”
PORTLAND, ME — Barely one week after bombshell reporting from ProPublica exposing Susan Collins at the center of an alleged pay-for-play scandal, Huffpost revealed that super PACs backing Collins are raking in campaign contributions from dark money groups and over $7 million from undisclosed donors hiding behind fake non-profits and shell companies.
Experts suggest there could be schemes at play where donors are funneling money through dark money and shell groups to support Senator Susan Collins in dealings similar to that of Navatek, as exposed by ProPublica.
Read the whole piece here or see highlights below:
Before President Donald Trump effectively disbanded it, the FBI’s anti-corruption unit investigated Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a potential pay-to-play scheme involving a government contractor who went to jail for concealing a $150,000 donation to help her 2020 campaign by passing it through a nonprofit.
The same kind of dark-money contributions that led to the now-scuttled investigation haven’t dried up. Two super PACs backing her current reelection campaign, including one run by Scott Reed, the operative at the center of the ProPublica story, have received $7.4 million in undisclosed contributions from nonprofits that appear to exist solely to hide donors’ identities.
“When you see millions funneled through an entity going to different committees but no transparency about where the money originated from, that’s dangerous from a corruption perspective because that could very well be a situation like what we see with Susan Collins and Navatek,” Ghosh said.
After Kao made his shell donation — but before public records could reveal it — a staffer for Reed’s consultancy sought Kao’s phone number so Collins could thank him for his dark-money donation. “This is a perfect illustration that dark money is only dark for the general public,” Ghosh said. “It is not dark to the folks that are orchestrating the scheme.”
The $7.4 million in unknown contributions helping Collins now, however, is masked behind an intricate web of conservative dark money groups that appear to exist solely to hide the true identity of their donors.
Pine Tree Results PAC, run by Reed and funded by Collins through a joint fundraising committee, is the biggest recipient of these dark-money donations. [...] Reed previously ran the 1820 PAC and personally solicited the $150,000 contribution from Kao in 2020 after Kao contributed to Collins’ campaign and said he wanted to contribute more as he lobbied her office for help winning federal contracts, according to ProPublica.
Stronger America, Inc. is a political nonprofit that appears to solely back Collins’ reelection campaign. Paul Cooksey, a longtime GOP operative and former Senate committee counsel, runs it, and it has spent more than $11 million on advertising to boost Collins, according to the New York Times. Collins attended a fundraiser for the nonprofit in 2026 at a D.C. townhouse owned by Oracle, the data giant owned by billionaire Republican donor Larry Ellison, the Times reported.
Unlike Kao’s donation, the source of nearly all of this spending is unknown to the public. But as the ProPublica reporting showed, lawmakers know it helps elect them.
“It’s quite disturbing that we’re asked to participate in a democratic process, but we as voters are deprived of this very important information,” Ghosh said. “It is genuinely a big problem that we don’t know who’s behind $2 billion in spending.”
###