Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is pushing back against a ProPublica report published Tuesday that suggested her 2020 Senate campaign was connected to a Biden-era FBI investigation into an alleged pay-to-play and bribery scheme.
Collins spokeswoman Annie Clark disputed the characterization, saying the senator’s campaign was never a target of the inquiry and cooperated with investigators throughout.
“It is important to note that during the Biden Administration the FBI and the Department of Justice thoroughly investigated the … matter. The Collins campaign cooperated fully with the FBI throughout the investigation, producing all of the documents it requested and serving as fact witnesses in official settings,” Clark said. “In response to the allegations in the ProPublica piece, the FBI clearly stated that a suggestion of wrongdoing by Senator Collins or her staff is ‘totally false.'”
Collins’ office also said in a statement posted on social media that “the seven-year-old allegations made against Senator Collins and her staff in this piece are categorically false,” adding there have never been any allegations of wrongdoing by the Collins for Senator campaign and that the campaign was never the target of the FBI investigation.
The ProPublica report also described President Trump as having “stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers” and having “eviscerated” specialized FBI and DOJ public corruption teams.
The story arrives as Collins, one of the Senate’s most bipartisan and moderate Republicans, faces a competitive reelection bid. Critics of the report have noted that one of the two FBI agents named as leading the probe was previously reported to have pursued action against Elon Musk, while the other was involved in the Justice Department’s investigations of Trump during the Biden administration.
Collins has long been known for working across the aisle and weighing major votes independently of party leadership, a record that has made her difficult to categorize within either party’s base. Her office maintains that record has no bearing on the underlying facts of the ProPublica report, which it says are simply inaccurate.
The episode is the latest instance of a federal investigation touching a Republican official’s political operation surfacing publicly during an active campaign, following a string of Biden-era Justice Department actions that drew scrutiny from conservatives, including subpoenas for congressional phone records as part of the Arctic Frost investigation and prosecutions tied to 2020 election protests.
