Discredited Activists At ProPublica Concoct Susan Collins Hit Piece

The left-wing propaganda operation better known as ProPublica released a hit piece targeting Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on Tuesday, alleging she was involved in a pay-to-play scheme and that the Trump administration helped shut down the investigation.

To make the claim that has been denied by both Collins’ team and the FBI, ProPublica enlists discredited former FBI agent Kevin Gounaud, who sought to use lawfare to take down Elon Musk, and the testimony of Martin Kao, the man in jail for making illegal campaign contributions.

ProPublica suggested in its latest anti-Republican hit piece that Collins and her 2020 Senate campaign were involved in a pay-to-play bribery scheme. According to ProPublica, a staffer for Collins’ campaign met with Navatek CEO Martin Kao, because the company wanted government contracts in Maine. Navatek is a Hawaiian defense contractor. In exchange for government contract, so goes the ProPublica story, Kao would make donations to Collins’ campaign through a shell company. But Kao allegedly “wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from.”

Notably, the allegations were investigated by the Biden FBI and nobody from Collins’ team was charged. Collins’ team also denied claims that Collins’ campaign was ever a subject of the inquiry. Annie Clark, Deputy Chief of Staff for Collins, saying Collins’ campaign “was never the target of the FBI investigation.”

Clark also pointed out that rather than take the word of the FBI, the story’s central framing relies on a man who “pled guilty to five counts of money laundering, three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and making false submissions to the FEC. 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, including alleging that our office required contributions before taking meetings and engaged in extortion, pay for play, and bribery.”

In other words, at the heart of this story are allegations about a pay-for-play scheme made by an unreliable narrator, Kao. ProPublica itself hints that Kao could be unreliable, writing that “Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme” and that “Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.” Nonetheless, ProPublica dedicated an entire story that began by trusting this unreliable narrator. To bolster their story, ProPublica relies on Kevin Gounaud, a former FBI agent. Gounaud and his fellow FBI agent Michelle Ball are described by ProPublica as “experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit” with Gounaud specifically having “worked on elaborate undercover operations.” The duo were trying to get to the bottom of Martin Kao and Navatek’s lobbying operation. The agents “zeroed in” on Collins despite Kao allegedly having involvement with “more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff,” according to ProPublica.

That Gounaud and Ball reportedly “zeroed in” on the Republican senator should raise questions about possible bias or political motives, but for ProPublica, that’s standard operating procedure.

According to ProPublica, Gounaud and Ball’s efforts to nail Collins and the alleged bribery scheme were halted when the agents “became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign.”

But Gounaud was not some honest, neutral broker trying to fix obvious corruption in the nation’s capital who became a victim of “Trump’s retribution campaign.”

Gounaud spent weeks fighting to be assigned to Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s spying on the Trump campaign, in 2017. After Gounaud’s totally objective and neutral probe into a nothingburger targeting Collins was ended, Gounaud’s quest for justice led him to coincidentally targeting yet another conservative — Elon Musk.

Gounaud emailed a supervisor in February of 2025 recommending a criminal investigation of Musk over Musk’s plans to have federal employees report on five things they did during the work week, according to emails released by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

If ProPublica’s two key subjects including a criminal and a man with a history of targeting Republicans was not enough to cast a shadow of doubt on the credibility and bias of this story and outlet, let’s not forget the outlet has spent years running anti-Republican propaganda.

Take for example ProPublica’s long-running crusade against Justice Clarence Thomas. In one hit piece, ProPublica falsely claimed Thomas violated the law by not reporting vacations he took with longtime friend Harlan Crow. ProPublica cited left-wing “judicial ethics” experts who, as pointed out in these pages by Mark Paoletta, “are funded by the same left-wing billionaires funding ProPublica.”

Further, ProPublica failed to mention that the Judicial Conference of the United States, which is charged by law with implementing and enforcing the ethics law for the federal judiciary, had already considered these allegations and ruled in 2012 that Thomas did not fail to disclose any required information regarding travel reimbursements, as Paoletta reported.

In another case, ProPublica smeared Thomas for not disclosing he used a $65 ticket to attend a University of Nebraska football game with his friends. The reporting threshold is $415. Paoletta reported he “learned that ProPublica reporters were specifically told the price of the ticket by the Nebraska Athletic Office, but they deliberately did not put this fact in their piece. This would have destroyed their claim that Thomas violated the law by not disclosing these tickets. They are dishonest journalists.”

ProPublica also went after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and had prepared a story claiming he was not accepted to West Point in 1999. They pulled their article before publication after Hegseth released his acceptance letter.

There’s no doubt that Congress and big corporations have a rather unsettling relationship. Whether that includes Collins is unclear, though it’s likely that there are other members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, who may be involved in questionable lobbying practices.

But when the outlet that has a history of targeting Republicans “zeroes in” on a conservative senator that leftists are desperately trying to beat these upcoming midterms and relies on the most flimsy of sourcing and claims, it’s a good chance the article is a waste of time.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2