Augusta, ME – New allegations of corruption have hit Susan Collins as a report from the Intercept and the Portland Press Herald reveals that as Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet program was embroiled in scandal, the defense contractor “showered Susan Collins with cash” ahead of a key defense funding vote. Collins, who served as the Ranking Member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee at the time, was “by far the biggest single beneficiary” of Lockheed Martin cash in the two months leading up to a July 2023 vote where she voted to appropriate funds for 83 of the company’s jets. The influx of cash and key vote came in the immediate aftermath of a government watchdog report that “detailed a cascade of new problems with the program.”

Misha Linnehan, spokesperson for the Maine Democratic Party, released the following statement:

“When Lockheed Martin was in hot water for potentially wasting taxpayer dollars, they seem to have known exactly who could turn down the temperature – Susan Collins. Collins took tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from the defense contractor, and then voted to continue funding their F-35 jet programs despite the warnings of a government watchdog. These revelations are just the latest example that when money talks, Susan Collins listens.”

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The Intercept/Portland Press Herald: Lockheed Martin Showered Susan Collins With Cash As F-35 Program Hit Turbulence

• In May 2023, the Pentagon’s shiny new fighter jet was not looking so shiny or new.

• Already a decade late and nearly $200 billion over its original cost estimate, the F-35 program faced a new crisis. An internal government watchdog report detailed a cascade of new problems with the program, which was in a period of flux amid plans to upgrade the jet’s engine and cooling system.

• The report from the Government Accountability Office criticized the Pentagon for lumping those upgrades in with the overall purchase of the planes. Conflating the two, the authors said, would limit congressional insight into cost increases. And they criticized the contractors behind the aircraft for failing to deliver the F-35 in a timely manner.

• For Lockheed Martin, the main defense giant overseeing the development of the F-35, the timing was far from ideal. In a few weeks, Congress was set to debate the Pentagon’s mammoth budget — and with it, new funding for the military’s purchase of F-35 jets.

• So Lockheed and its lobbyists went on a charm offensive in Washington. The weapons maker shelled out hundreds of thousands over a two-month period, in what the money-in-politics watchdog Open Secrets described as “one of the largest coordinated lobbying efforts” around that year’s military budget.

• No member of Congress benefited more than Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who at the time served as the ranking member on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

• From May 1 to June 30, 2023, employees and top executives from Lockheed Martin donated $59,500 to Collins’s campaign committee. The donations were outliers during that period: Collins was among the largest recipients of Lockheed cash; the company was her largest single donor over those two months; and it was the largest spending blitz on Collins by Lockheed compared to the same period in other years.

• The effort appeared to pay off for Lockheed. In July 2023, less than two months after the release of the Government Accountability Office report, Collins voted in favor of appropriating funds to purchase 83 new F-35 jets. Later that year, when the final version of the military budget was signed into law, Collins celebrated the economic boon she said it would bring to the state of Maine. […]

• Collins’s position on the Defense Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee likely played a role in the outsized donations, according to analyst Dan Grazier. […]

• In the final weeks of the biggest fight of her political career against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson, fresh scrutiny on Collins’s donations from defense contractors has become a sore spot for her campaign.

• In some cases, the senator’s interactions with defense firms are the routine for Washington: glad-handing, lobbying, contributions, and directing pork-barrel spending back home. Not all of it, though, is standard.

• Last month, a bombshell report in ProPublica detailed an FBI investigation into an alleged pay-to-play scheme. A former defense contractor claimed to federal agents that he worked with figures tied to Collins to disguise campaign donations — and got federal contracts totaling $32 million in return. (The FBI probe fizzled after Trump returned to office and purged the bureau; Collins denied wrongdoing, pushing back on elements of the report.)

• On Wednesday, more than 250 Mainers signed a letter to the state’s attorney general asking the official to investigate the allegations of corruption, according to Maine Morning Star, a local news outlet.

• And earlier this month, The Intercept reported on donations from another defense contractor, AM General, and its parent company, whose employees gave $58,000 to fundraising committees associated with Collins after a damning assessment from the Army put its federal contracts in jeopardy. […]

• From May 1 to June 30, 2023, Lockheed’s corporate PAC doled out $421,000 in a bipartisan blitz to various campaign political action committees, campaign funds, state parties, and charitable foundations. (Aside from 2024, the year of the presidential election, contributions in that two-month period in 2023 eclipsed subsequent years. In the same period this year, Lockheed’s corporate PAC made 128 donations totaling $236,000; last year, it gave $286,000 across 158 donations during the same period.)

• Collins was by far the biggest single beneficiary of the influx of cash — which came at a time when she was not actively campaigning. And, unlike the donations spread out to other campaign committees, the cash going from Lockheed into Collins’s coffers during those months came exclusively in the form of individual donations by employees and executives, including the firm’s CEO and chief operating officer, data from the Federal Election Commission shows.

• Lobbyists working for Lockheed contributed another $5,000 to Collins during that period, and corporate PACs for Lockheed’s lobbying firms shelled out another $5,500 total, according to FEC disclosures.

• Among individual contributions by Lockheed employees, donations to Collins made up more than 10 percent of all donations during the two-month period surrounding the watchdog report.

• Only the firm’s in-house employee PAC, which received 75 percent of all employee donations, took in more from figures tied to Lockheed. Collins got more than twice as much as the next highest recipient, ActBlue, the Democratic Party-aligned fundraising vehicle, which received 4 percent of all Lockheed employee contributions in that period, according to FEC data. […]

• Virtually all employee contributions from Lockheed workers and executives to Collins during her current term came during that two-month window, according to the FEC.

• Lockheed donations made up a quarter of all contributions during May and June 2023 to Collins’s main fundraising arm, Collins for Senator. The next runner-up was telecom giant Charter Communications, whose employee contributions made up just 8 percent of gifts to the Collins campaign in the second quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.