Senator Susan Collins was given protection from criminal prosecution by Donald Trump's justice department

 Susan Collins’ fundraising tactics sure look crooked to me | Steve Collins

Echo opinion published in the Portland Press Herald by Steve Collins

New reporting suggests our senior senator promoted a shady contractor in return for campaign cash. More investigation is urgently needed.

Senator Susan Collins has been bribed to keep silent about Donald Trump. She has been pandering for money for several years and has been corrupted by power.

Opinion:  Back in 2019, I received many invitations to head to University of Maine to see a nifty new boat created by the world’s largest 3D printer.

How I wish I’d gone.

That outing might have provided a clue that while Senator Susan Collins sometimes hauls truckloads of federal cash to Maine, it comes with a price.

As a shocking and deft investigation by ProPublica this week showed, the company behind the boat, a little-known Hawaiian venture named Navatek, got Collins’ help after its top executive wrote a 💲150,000 check to a super PAC helping Collins with her 2020, reelection bid.

At the boat unveiling event in 2019, Collins and other dignitaries saw “a 25-foot patrol boat with a hull form developed by Navatek, a leader in ship design and a UMaine Composites Center industrial partner” in 3D printing the 5,000-pound vessel.

Collins told the crowd, “Just think of the implications for our military if they could print two prototypes of new, fast boats. I know Navatek is working on that right now. That’s going to be good for both taxpayers as well as our military service members who will ultimately benefit from this technology.”
Except, guess what❓ That wasn’t the case. The project, funded by a budget provision pushed by Collins, may have helped UMaine and Navatek — but didn’t mean anything to our Navy, the ostensible beneficiary.

Drop by the Corner Bakery on Capitol Hill and you can pick up an Uptown Turkey-Avocado Sandwich served on ‘Harvest Toast’ for 💲13.49.

But going there can prove a lot more costly if you’re angling to get help from Collins.

Two months after the lunch, the super PAC boss, Scott Reed, told Navatek officials that Collins would get the company 💲32 million in Navy contracts, according to the nonprofit news organization, which said it reviewed a trove of emails and legal documents.

A cheap lunch led to millions of taxpayer dollars for a shady contractor that ultimately had little to offer the Navy. Collins raked in hundreds of thousands to promote her campaign. Par for the course in the nation’s capital, perhaps, but it stinks.

We’ve known for years that Navatek ran a crooked operation — its former CEO is in federal prison — and that it had ties to Collins.

What ProPublica added to the tale are stunning details that paint Collins and her staff as in on the action and the confirmation the FBI had launched an investigation into her connections to Navatek — an investigation that died when Donald Trump took office and he fired nearly everyone who had a hand in it.

Collins’ camp insists the five-term senator did nothing wrong. Her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson, said Collins’ actions as chronicled by ProPublica amounted to “corruption of the highest order.”

Trump arguably does much worse in full view of the public nearly every day.

Suddenly, though, we have a plausible explanation for the reluctance of Maine’s senior senator to stand up to Trump’s tyrannical moves: The president protected her reputation by eliminating personnel behind the FBI probe. At most, he may have shielded Collins from facing federal criminal charges.

Everybody, and that includes Sen. Collins, should agree that further investigation is needed now.

#VoteBlue❕

Senator Susan Collins called to give accountability for fraud accusations that were buried by Trump's justice department- WWWTP?

It’s Maine’s turn to be concerned about Susan Collins | Editorial
The senator’s complacent response to open allegations of bribery sends voters a very clear and disrespectful message.

Echo editorial board opinion published in the Maine Sunday Telegram.

The words “fraud, waste and abuse” have formed part of a popular Republican Party slogan in recent years. The party’s most prominent figures obsess publicly about the ferreting out of wrongdoing they insist is rampant in government, at the federal level as well as here in Maine.

Against this intolerant backdrop, one might think that last week’s reporting by ProPublica on the killing off, in 2025, of a federal investigation into allegations of bribery by Sen. Susan Collins and staff would be met with a degree of solemnity if not humility. Think again.

The Collins campaign’s emphasis on the events taking place “seven years ago” cynically attempts to detract from the crux of the story, which hinges on the collapse of the investigation — reportedly active until the beginning of last year — due to a newly insufficiently staffed and uninterested FBI.

This editorial board isn’t about to make fun or light of the name of the made-up LLC used on the scan of the $150,000 check presented by ProPublica (“the Society of Young Women Scientist [sic] and Engineers”) which sought to exploit the white-hot cause of women in STEM.

Nor are we going to attempt to adjudicate on what the emails between Kao and political operative Scott Reed suggest or reveal.

In a functioning and properly resourced government, that’s a job that falls squarely to the Department of Justice. It’s a process that, once commenced, ought to have been followed to its logical administrative and legal end.

So let’s keep the focus on the demise of the probe and the conditions that led to its abandonment. Whether or not there are 3D-printed vessels to show for this tortured bit of negotiating, as Collins’ staffers were at pains to highlight with flashcards at a Portland press conference last week, becomes irrelevant in that light.

In the absence of anything approaching law enforcement as usual — an expectation reasonably held by the public, a basic check on congressional power — it’s audacious to insist on innocence and stoke conspiratorial lines of thinking by reaching for terms like “partisan hit job.”

Collins was quick to set the mood, labeling the exhaustive and level reporting a “a partisan hit job” and questioning why “anyone would take the word of a felon who’s been convicted twice” and “a convicted liar.”  (OMG this is beyond ludicrous❗)

That this particular felon — a Hawaii-based military contracting executive named Michael Kao — was found guilty of money laundering and fraud would seem to some to increase his credibility on such matters. For many of the claims made by Kao, the reporting referred to corresponding emails and other materials.

“Shame on ProPublica,” Collins told the Wall Street Journal, having said she was “offended” by the reporting — “so offensive” and “disgraceful.”

It is extremely disappointing to watch Collins and members of her staff move to immediately discredit a thorough and fair piece of investigative journalism on political and personal grounds.

The Trump administration has wailed about fraud while studiously dismantling the apparatus that’s in place to catch it. Borrowing straight from ProPublica: “Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.”

This is just one of many unsettling paradoxes of this second presidential term.

Voters are bothered by this appearance of wrongdoing — it would be hard not to be. To be satisfied that this is best we can do, a voter would need to be disillusioned with the executive branch to the point of defeat.

There’s a world in which Sen. Collins, her staffers and supporters could confidently and respectfully acknowledge that widespread disquiet. That hasn’t happened. We’re not at all hopeful that it will.

Baltimore area Kushner real estate must disclose investors

Who is investing in Jared Kushner's Baltimore real estate?

Judge says the Kushner Company Must Reveal Identities of Real Estate Partners ~ By Alec MacGillis

The ruling comes in a class-action lawsuit filed by tenants of Kushner-managed apartment complexes in the Baltimore area.

The lawsuit was filed in Baltimore Circuit Court Wednesday morning by two plaintiffs:  Tenae Smith, who lives in the Dutch Village apartments in Northeast Baltimore, and Howard Smith, (not related) who lives in the Carroll Park apartments in Middle River.

Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's local real estate ties

A federal judge in Maryland ruled Friday that Jared Kushner’s family real estate company could not keep secret the identities of its partners in Baltimore-area apartment complexes that are the subject of a class-action lawsuit by tenants.

The class-action lawsuit was filed in September, following a May article co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine that described how Kushner Companies have used highly aggressive tactics in pursuing payments from tenants and former tenants of 15 large apartment complexes it owns and manages in the Baltimore area.

Jared Kushner's real estate firm seeks the arrest of tenants to collect rent

The lawsuit, filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, alleges that the Kushner Companies’ real estate management arm and related corporate entities have been improperly inflating payments owned by tenants by charging them late fees that are often baseless and in excess of state limits and court fees that are not actually approved by any court. The suit alleges that the late fees and court fees set in motion a vicious cycle in which rent payments are partly put toward the fees instead of the actual rent owed, thus deeming the tenant once again “late” on his or her rent payment, leading to yet more late fees and court fees. Tenants are pressured to pay the snowballing bills with immediate threat of eviction, the suit alleges.

Kushner Companies and its co-defendants sought to have the case transferred from state court to federal court, which would spare it from having to face an all-Baltimore City jury. 

To have this transfer approved, the defendants needed to show that none of their ownership partners were residents of Maryland. The defendants requested that their submission of the list of partners be sealed from public view, citing the high degree of media interest in Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser.

“Given the tenor of the media’s reporting of this case, including politically-motivated innuendo no doubt intended to disparage the First Family, there is foreseeable risk of prejudice to the privacy rights and reputations of innocent private investors,” wrote Westminster Management, Kushner Companies’ real estate management arm, in a court filing in November.

This request to seal the partners’ identities was challenged several weeks later in a joint filing by ProPublica, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Baltimore TV station WMAR-TV. They argued that the press had a “presumptive right” to view court documents, and that the Kushner Companies had not identified the “compelling government interest” that is required to block public access.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. District Court Judge James K. Bredar stated that the high level of public interest in Kushner and his business associates if anything enhanced the case for maintaining access to the identities of the defendants in the case.

“The Defendants are no doubt correct that the presence of the Kushner (and therefore Trump) families in this case has raised its profile and attracted significant, though perhaps not ‘unprecedented,’ media attention,” Bedar wrote. “But increased public interest in a case does not, by itself, overcome the presumption of access. In fact, it would logically strengthen it, particularly when the interest is due to the presence of important public figures in the litigation. 

In such an instance, the public’s desire to evaluate the Court’s decision-making is likely augmented. And beyond this apparently inevitable media scrutiny, Defendants have largely relied on ‘vague superlatives’ and insinuations instead of demonstrating specific harms.”

Several recent news reports have given a hint of just how far-reaching the network of investors in the Maryland apartment complexes could be. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Kushner Companies last spring secured a $30 million equity investment in the Baltimore complexes and others of its holdings from Menora Mivtachim, one of Israel’s largest financial institutions, just as Jared Kushner was about to make his first official visit to Israel as President Trump’s designated broker of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. More recently, a New Yorker article describedthe Kushner Companies’ aggressive pursuit of Chinese investors in its real estate ventures.

In his ruling, Bedar gave the defendants until Feb. 9 to provide the list of their ownership partners. The Kushner Companies could opt instead to return the case to the Circuit Court in Baltimore, if the firm decides the downsides of having to disclose the investment partners in the complexes outweigh the downsides of having the case heard by a Baltimore jury.

A request for comment from Kushner Companies’ spokesman was not immediately returned Friday afternoon. A lawyer for the plaintiff tenants, Andy Freeman, said he and his colleagues on the case had not yet gotten any indication of how Kushner Companies planned to proceed.

“We’re pleased with the ruling. We don’t think that parties to federal litigation should be able to conceal their identity,” Freeman said. He added: “This is just the first step in moving toward justice for the tenants.”