Tag: susan collins

3 Military Industrial Execs Indicted for Illegal Campaign Contributions to Sen. Susan Collins

Three military-industrial executives with Department of Defense contracts have been indicted for allegedly making illegal contributions to Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-Maine) reelection bid.

According to a statement by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the three executives under investigation are Martin Kao, former chief executive of the firm Martin Defense Group, Clifford Chen, its chief financial officer, and Lawrence “Kahele” Lum Kee, an accountant for the firm.

Under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, restrictions are placed upon who can make donations to candidates and the maximum amount that they can donate to those campaigns. Military contractors are among those prohibited from making campaign contributions under the legislation, in part due to the conflicts of interest that such contributions entail.

In an effort to get around this restriction, the three indicted men allegedly formed a shell company in 2019 called the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers. From there, they funneled $150,000 to the Collin-supporting 1820 PAC.

According to the DOJ statement, the three men also “allegedly used family members as conduits to make illegal contributions to the campaign committee of the same candidate, and then reimbursed themselves for those donations using funds obtained from their employer.” Donations given this way exceeded $52,000.

The charge, if proven to be true, would put the three men in clear violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which prohibits the use of “conduits,” or go-betweens to give donations in a secretive or roundabout way.

The trio has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make conduit and government contractor contributions, making conduit contributions, and making government contractor contributions, according to the official indictment (pdf). Kao, the chief executive, has also been charged with two counts of making false statements for causing the submission of false information to the Federal Election Committee.

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Susan Collins Engineered the USPS Disaster She’s Now Protesting

At this point, it should come as no surprise that the vast majority of Congressional Republicans have responded to the Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Postal Service with near silence.

The president openly admitted last week that he is blocking additional funding to the USPS to undermine its ability to handle the coming surge of mail-in votes this fall. U.S. mail delivery has also slowed down dramatically nationwide since his handpicked postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a major GOP donor who has been in frequent communication with the Republican National Committee, began instituting a raft of new policies for reasons of “efficiency.” These have included cutting overtime pay for postal workers, removing sorting machines from postal facilities, and eliminating mail boxes.

Yet despite the unique threat these moves have posed to American democracy, the only GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill to speak out are those facing competitive re-elections this fall, such as Montana Senator Steve Daines and Maine Senator Susan Collins.

Collins is in a particularly precarious position; a July poll released by Colby College showed her trailing her Democratic opponent, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, by five points. Last Thursday, Collins sent a letter to DeJoy asking him to “address” the mail delivery delays being across the nation. “I share the goal of putting the USPS back on a financially sustainable path,” she wrote. “However, this goal cannot be achieved by shortchanging service to the public.”

As it turns out, Collins is actually one of the members of Congress most responsible for the Postal Service’s devastation. Long before DeJoy started manipulating the USPS, Collins was at the forefront of a bill that crippled the agency’s finances.

In 2005, she sponsored and introduced legislation, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), that required the USPS to pre-pay the next 50 years worth of health and retirement benefits for all of its employees—a rule that no other federal agency must follow. As chair of the Senate oversight panel at the time, she shepherded the bill’s passage, along with her House GOP counterpart Tom Davis, during a lame-duck session of Congress. It passed by a voice vote without any objections—a maneuver that gave members little time to consider what they were doing.

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