A Hawaii defense contractor's alleged scheme to trade nearly $900,000 in political donations for tens of millions of dollars in government work is no longer under federal investigation, because the FBI unit built to pursue it does not exist anymore. A ProPublica review of FBI records and interviews found that Director Kash Patel dismantled the bureau's elite public-corruption squad after President Trump's return to office in 2025, closing out a case that had already implicated more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff.
The contractor at the center of the case is Navatek, a Honolulu-based defense and maritime engineering firm led by CEO Martin Kao. According to ProPublica's review of bureau records, Navatek ran a systematic pay-to-play operation: nearly $900,000 in political donations routed to members of Congress in exchange for government contracts worth more than $40 million a year. Kao is currently serving an 87-month federal prison sentence for PPP loan fraud and campaign-finance crimes, and it was his cooperation with investigators — including a 50-page document detailing his dealings with lawmakers and staff — that gave the FBI its roadmap before the probe was shut down.
How a Corner Bakery Meeting Led to $21.5 Million in Earmarks
The clearest transaction FBI investigators traced involved Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. After a meeting between Kao and Scott Reed, the chair of Collins' 1820 PAC, at a Corner Bakery restaurant, Navatek routed $150,000 through a shell company called Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers LLC to the super PAC, ProPublica reported. Within weeks, the Senate allocated $21.5 million for Navatek projects in Maine.
Kao told FBI agents he believed the money and the earmarks were connected on a larger scale, too: he said he understood the $150,000 donation routed through the shell company was tied to $32 million in naval contracts for his company, according to an internal company email ProPublica reviewed. Describing his approach to cultivating members of Congress, Kao told agents, "It takes two to tangle."
Collins' office rejects any suggestion that the senator traded her office for campaign cash. Annie Clark, her deputy chief of staff, said the senator's office "vigorously" denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims "outlandish." The FBI itself has also pushed back on the idea that Collins was a subject of a substantiated case. Bureau spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency investigated claims against Collins years ago "and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins' campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false."
The Collins transaction is the one ProPublica's reporting lays out in the most detail, but Kao's own account to investigators went well beyond a single senator. He told agents the $150,000 routed through the shell company was one piece of a broader strategy he applied across Capitol Hill: identify appropriators and committee staff who controlled funding relevant to Navatek's maritime and defense engineering work, build relationships through PAC and super PAC donations, and follow up with earmark requests once the money had cleared. The 50-page document he later gave the FBI named more than a dozen members of Congress and staff in connection with that pattern, according to ProPublica.
Why the FBI's Anti-Corruption Squad Went Dark
The Navatek allegations were being run down by an FBI unit known internally as CR-15, a squad dedicated to investigating public corruption involving a bipartisan group of lawmakers. That squad no longer exists in the form it took when it was working the case, according to ProPublica and a separate report from Defense One. Patel purged the unit after taking over the bureau in 2025. The agent leading the Navatek-related work, Michelle Ball, was fired in October 2025. A second agent on the case, Kevin Gounaud, was pushed out in early 2026.
The FBI's corruption case did not fail in isolation. The Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, which historically would have picked up any prosecutable findings from an FBI corruption probe, collapsed in February 2025 after department leadership ordered prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York City's mayor and much of the section's leadership resigned rather than comply, ProPublica reported. Defense One's reporting on the same investigation described the FBI's Navatek inquiry as centering on allegations that the company funneled approximately $900,000 in political contributions to members of Congress in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in defense contracts, and confirmed that Patel dismantled the unit responsible for investigating congressional corruption before that work was finished.
Navatek itself has changed names twice since the events under investigation: Kao renamed it Martin Defense Group, and after Kao's arrest, founder Steven Loui regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar, according to ProPublica and Defense One's reporting.
No member of Congress or congressional staffer named in Kao's document has been charged, and ProPublica reported that lead agent Michelle Ball had only just won approval for a new phase of the investigation, centered on Navatek's dealings in South Carolina, before she was fired — meaning the allegations against individual lawmakers and staff were never resolved one way or the other by prosecutors. With both the FBI squad and the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section gone, there is currently no clear successor office positioned to pick the file back up.
What It Means for Contractors
For contractors weighing how aggressively to court appropriators and committee staff, the Navatek case is a reminder that the deterrent value of federal corruption enforcement now depends heavily on whether an investigative unit survives long enough to finish its work. A company can hand the FBI a detailed accounting of its own conduct — as Kao did, from prison, no less — and still see the underlying inquiry into the lawmakers on the receiving end wind down before any charges are filed. That does not clear the underlying conduct; it means no agency reached a public conclusion on it.
It also raises the stakes around routing political money through affiliated entities, such as the shell company ProPublica identified in the Collins transaction. Contract awards that follow closely on the heels of campaign contributions or earmark requests remain exactly the kind of pattern investigators, journalists and eventually competitors and inspectors general look for, even when the FBI squad that would have built a criminal case has been reorganized out of existence. Government relations staff and compliance officers at companies with PAC or super PAC giving programs should treat this case as evidence that congressional and campaign-finance ethics obligations do not loosen just because federal enforcement capacity has.
