Susan Collins maintains links to operatives tied to illegal straw donation scheme

A federal inquiry found that Scott Reed, head of the Pine Tree Results Super PAC, and MacKenzie Dolan, co-founder of The Morning Group, were emailed by convicted fraudster Martin Kao in December 2019 about creating a shell company to deliver a $150,000 straw donation to the 1820 PAC supporting Senator Susan Collins. The donation was made two weeks later, and both Reed and Dolan subsequently earned at least $300,000 from Collins’s campaign and over $1.1 million from Pine Tree Results.

While the FBI cleared Reed and Dolan in 2021 and no charges have been filed against Collins, Democrats are using the story to question her integrity in the close Maine Senate contest with Troy Jackson. Collins’s campaign asserts that Kao alone was guilty and that investigators found no wrongdoing by the senator or her aides. The controversy has spurred a Democratic ethics complaint, a high-budget ad push, and renewed scrutiny of Collins’s fundraising network during the final weeks of the campaign.