Remember that article about Susan Collins greasing the skids for a campaign contributor? This one? Remember this quote?:
“It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators.”
Ay-yup, one of those senators was Chris Coons:
U.S. Sen. Chris Coons received $18,700 in campaign donations years ago from the family of a Hawaiian defense contractor who is now in federal prison for making illegal campaign contributions to another senator.
Asked by WHYY News this week about the donations, Coons said his campaign quietly redirected the money from former Navatek CEO Martin Kao and his wife, Tiffany Lam, to four Delaware charities in October 2023.
A campaign aide to Coons said a June 2023 article from a Honolulu news site about Kao’s crimes and “pay-to-play politics” prompted the senator to reroute the money to the Delaware nonprofits. The Democrat is seeking a fourth term in November after handily winning his party’s primary race earlier this month.
“I have literally thousands of donors,” Coons told WHYY News by phone from Washington, D.C.
Coons said he might have met Kao at a 2019 fundraiser with other senators in Seattle, but “I do not remember him at all.”
Coons said that in the fall of 2023, after Kao’s arrest and conviction “was brought to the attention of my campaign team, they came to me and recommended giving the contributions to charity, and we acted quickly. But the arrest of someone in Hawaii — who I may or may not have met years before — is not something that I would regularly monitor.”
Kids, you’re smart. Navetek identified senators who are/were prone to do favors in exchange for campaign cash. Chris Coons is/was one of them. Read the entire report, including Coons’ disclaimers. Y’see, he’s a victim of a terrible campaign finance system, which he has done nothing to change. Poor nepo baby.
A True Statement: “Delaware GOP Says Fighting At Top Of Ticket Unlikely To Affect Downticket GOP Results.”:
But the head of Delaware’s GOP, Gene Truono, said a public disagreement between its candidates at the top of the ticket won’t affect downballot candidates, which are the races he’s focused on.
He said candidates for statewide seats are, “really responsible for running their own campaigns.”
Truono added Delaware’s GOP hasn’t seen a shift in polling numbers after the forum.
“If anything, this kind of heightened press coverage around the statements… now opens the door for dialogue,” he said,
Whistling past the electoral graveyard.
Hack Of FBI Worse Than You Might Think. What incompetence brings:
What’s going on over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
Ostensibly, the agency is supposed to be in charge of cybersecurity, not the victim of cybercrimes. But that didn’t stop the FBI from getting hacked, and boy, did it get hacked badly.
The more we learn, the worse it gets.
The hacking group, ShinyHunters, got access to the FBI’s online jobs portal, including information on current and former agents, job applicants, home addresses, job histories, spouses—you name it, they got it.
Reuters learned that the 5,000-line spreadsheet—which the hackers released as a little taste of the full two- to three-terabyte trove of data they stole—contains information on who was assigned to sensitive divisions like intelligence, security, and counterespionage.
It scooped up staffers working in groups with names like “China criminal enterprise unit” and “Russia Critical Infra and Tech Threat,” as well as sensitive information on all FBI staff—which is about 38,000 people.
This is what happens when you put cartoon characters in charge.
Susan Collins’ Lies About ProPublica Article, Exposed–By ProPublica:
As the scandal over Susan Collins’ relationship with Hawaii defense contractor Navatek became the central issue in her hotly contested senate campaign, she and her top aides mustered a defense with a series of incorrect and misleading claims.
The ProPublica story revealed that the FBI had been circling the senator, her top aides and a pro-Collins super PAC in recent years, asking questions about their relationship with Navatek. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump fired or pushed out most of the federal agents and lawyers investigating high-profile federal corruption matters, including those working on the Kao case. The dismissals ended the corruption review, which was in its early stages.
After the story published, Collins and her campaign denied any wrongdoing in numerous media appearances. Some of the statements made by Collins and her representatives are not accurate.
I’ll share one:
Collins: “In 2021, the Biden Justice Department found there was no wrongdoing by anyone on my campaign staff, my office or me.”
Collins: “The Biden-led Justice Department and FBI totally cleared my office, my campaign and me five years ago of these seven-year-old allegations.”
The reality?:
An FBI spokesperson told ProPublica the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign.”
But the investigation at the center of ProPublica’s story was based on claims Kao made between 2022 through 2024 — not seven years ago, as Collins states. That investigation did not conclude under President Joe Biden but under Trump, in 2025, after his administration purged the agents and Department of Justice attorneys assigned to the case.
Collins is referring to the FBI’s initial investigation of Kao, which started in 2021. No one in Collins’ orbit was charged as a result of that earlier investigation.
FBI records reviewed by ProPublica show the agency remained interested in the conduct of Collins and her staff right up until the most recent phase of their investigation was shut down under Trump.
The documents show that Kao was still answering agents’ questions as late as September 2024, when he sat for a two-day interview with FBI agents at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu. During that interview, Kao provided them with a 50-page document offering many new allegations about his interactions with elected officials, including Collins.
And in early 2025, FBI agents were still examining Kao’s relationship with Collins, her staffers and employees of the super PAC, ProPublica found.
Read the rest. This series will win awards and, if there’s any justice, deep-six Collins’ reelection bid.
The US government accountability office (GAO) documented costly problems in several initiatives ICE has pursued since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025 and ordered the mass arrest and deportation of people his administration has deemed should be forced out of the country.
Among the misspending was nearly $3m to erect tents at the Guantánamo Bay US naval base in Cuba that were never used; $20m to maintain bought warehouses that are now being sold without having housed a single detainee; and excessive rates paid to hold detainees at the deficient and now-shuttered Florida lockup known as “Alligator Alcatraz”.
Congress gave ICE an unprecedented $45bn to expand detention capacity last year as part of the Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the agency has no comprehensive strategic plan for how to spend it wisely, the report warned. The detainee population has increased from 39,000 in January 2025 to 67,000 as of 30 July.
Shortly after Trump returned to the White House, the government began blowing money by hastily pursuing plans to detain more people who, by the administration’s reckoning, were in the US illegally, the report found. Often, the government has pursued people with temporary legal status or an asylum application, or some who have a green card but have used protest speech the administration deems dangerous.
In many other cases, despite saying it wanted to focus on “the worst of the worst” criminals, the Trump administration has spent resources on seeking, detaining and removing people with no criminal history who have violated civil immigration law yet lived, worked and paid taxes in the US for decades.
After spending much on warehouses to use for detention, that initiative has faltered, the report found. It has sold a lot of the property it bought but ICE has also “incurred significant costs” for the four warehouses that it plans to keep, including a $426m million outlay to renovate facilities in Arizona and Maryland that is on hold due to legal challenges.
ICE launched a plan to purchase facilities owned by private contractors that were already housing detainees, saying it would give more control over infrastructure and limit local governments’ ability to restrict their use.
The agency spent $1.5bn to buy two of them in July and could buy more, even though ICE has “not assessed the long-term affordability of owning these facilities”, the report said.
There’s more, but you get the picture–Give an out-of-control agency virtually unlimited funding, and waste, fraud and abuse will follow.
What do you want to talk about?
i put collins winning the election at a 65% probability
I’ll take that bet.
Especially at that spread. You sure ’bout that, Arthur?
Keep the detention facilities but release the immigrant detainees, prepare the centers for maximum MAGA occupancy, starting with El Bloated.
That’s not fair, he’d never fit in one of those cages.
Fair is not a consideration!
Supreme Court Legalizes Voter Disenfranchisement. Yes, the three liberal judges dissented:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/us/politics/supreme-court-citizenship-voter-lists.html
“The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Trump administration can deploy an expansive online system that combines citizenship information, Social Security numbers and other sensitive data about millions of Americans, including to allow states to use it to hunt for ineligible voters.
Critics fear that using the system could result in the purging of large numbers of valid voters from state rolls, if states choose to use it ahead of the midterm elections.
The majority concluded that a lower-court ruling that had blocked the Trump administration from rolling out the system was improper because it inhibited “the federal government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”
The emergency ruling was unsigned and gave no vote count, but the court’s three liberal justices joined in dissent. The ruling was a victory for the Trump administration as it tries to marshal the resources of the federal government to shape who can vote, and how. The effort has prompted legal challenges ahead of November’s midterm elections.”