In Reply to: Water wars come to the ballot box in Arizona- posted by mh on October 01, 2026 at 10:09:24
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.
This public revelation by the nonprofit news site ProPublica led to furious denials of any wrongdoing by Collins as she faces her toughest reelection race yet. But 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.
The dark-money contributions to Pine Tree Results PAC and Stronger Maine are “definitely” similar in appearance to the $150,000 donation made by the Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers LLC to the 1820 PAC back in 2020, Saurav Ghosh, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, told HuffPost.
“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.