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Timothy C. Woodcock is a Bangor attorney. He was on Sen. Bill Cohen’s personal and committee staffs. From 1983 to 1987, he was an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Maine, and, in 1987, he was an associate counsel on the Senate Iran-Contra Committee. He is married to Carol Woodcock, Sen. Susan Collins’ Bangor State Office representative.
In late September, several Maine newspapers ran a ProPublica story claiming FBI public integrity agents were “circling” Sen. Susan Collins until President Donald Trump “got in the way.” The story promises revelations, but upon close examination, it delivers nothing.
The story’s central figure is Martin Kao, former CEO of Navatek, a long-established Hawaii-based naval engineering firm. In July and August 2019, Kao and two associates funneled money to relatives, who then contributed to Collins’ 2020 campaign. Federal law prohibits these “conduit contributions.” In December 2019, Kao also used a shell company he created to give $150,000 in company funds to a super PAC supporting Collins.
Kao’s crimes went beyond just campaign contributions. In 2022, he pleaded guilty to defrauding the Paycheck Protection Program of more $12.5 million, money meant to help businesses shuttered by COVID. He is also accused of defrauding a bank of $3 million to buy an opulent Hawaii home.
Kao pleaded guilty in separate federal cases involving campaign contributions and financial fraud, and he is now in federal prison.
The majority of the ProPublica piece focuses on Kao’s illicit 2019 campaign contributions, but the story obscures the fact that none of this is “new” news. The federal indictment of Kao proves this point. In February 2022, a District of Columbia grand jury returned a five-count indictment against Kao and his associates. It detailed both the conduit contributions and the shell company contribution.
The December 2019 meeting at a Corner Bakery, which the story repeatedly highlights as though ProPublica had discovered it, appears in the indictment at paragraph 49, though without naming the bakery. Readers should understand that this meeting and the illegal contributions were not only documented, they were formally charged and prosecuted to conviction four years before ProPublica’s headline.
Significantly, the indictment does not identify either the Collins campaign committee or the super PAC. Instead, they are consistently referred to only as “Campaign Committee A” and “Political Committee A.” Prosecutors employ such masking terms to shield innocent parties from the unfairness of being besmirched by association with the accused. Omitting the identities of such parties from an indictment is always a deliberate decision.
The omission of the committees’ identities from the Kao indictment objectively demonstrates that the Biden Justice Department, headed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, decided that Collins and the committees deserved that protection. The omission of the committees’ identities also squares with the FBI’s recent statement that its investigation of Kao had “found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.” A simple internet search will yield the Kao indictment. Readers are encouraged to review it for themselves.
Then there are the FBI agents. By ProPublica’s own account, they were highly skilled and pored over “thousands” of Kao’s records, including emails with Collins’ “inner circle.” What does ProPublica contend these experienced agents missed? The story doesn’t clearly say.
That leaves a 50-page memo that Kao, himself, wrote in September 2024 in an unsuccessful attempt to reduce his sentence by implicating “dozens” of people on Capitol Hill. The story never says the memo even names Collins. And, in 2024, two years after his guilty plea, what could Kao have told the agents about Collins that they wouldn’t already have known? Once again, ProPublica doesn’t make that clear.
ProPublica’s omissions are not limited to the FBI investigation. In an Oct. 17 letter to the editor published by the Portland Press Herald, former Federal Election Commissioner Sean Cooksey explained a three-year FEC investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by Collins, her campaign or the super PAC. How did ProPublica’s reporters miss this?
ProPublica itself carefully avoids accusing Collins of wrongdoing. It trades instead on the transparently self-serving claims of a convicted fraudster, its assurances to readers of its own professionalism, and the corrosive power of insinuation. Readers deserve better. ProPublica should be held to account.