Democrat Troy Jackson hammered Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) over a reported FBI corruption probe during their first debate Tuesday night.
Jackson, the former Maine Senate president, laid out the allegations from a September ProPublica investigation as the two candidates clashed over Collins' ethics.
"As late as 2024, the FBI was circling around Senator Collins," Jackson said. "They had emails, they knew about meetings. They've got a great big check for $150,000. It's a pay-to-play scheme involving her office and our taxpayer dollars. And then when Trump came back, his administration dismantled the investigation."
He then tied Collins directly to the president.
"Now, she votes with Donald Trump 96 percent of the time," Jackson said. "I don't owe Trump. I don't owe the billionaires. I've spent my life fighting back against billionaires, but I do owe the people of Maine everything."
Collins again dismissed the ProPublica reporting as false, according to reporting by the Portland Press Herald, and Jackson kept pressing her on how the Trump administration ended the probe. Collins fired back by raising an ethics complaint a Republican lawmaker once filed against Jackson over his use of an Augusta home while he served in the Legislature.
ProPublica reported that the head of a pro-Collins super PAC met with executives from Hawaii defense contractor Navatek in 2019 and asked for a $500,000 donation, the Bangor Daily News reported. Then-CEO Martin Kao sent $150,000 through a shell company and later told company executives in an internal email that Collins had committed to getting Navatek $32 million in Navy contracts. Kao is now in prison for money laundering, bank fraud, and defrauding the federal government, WBUR reported.
An FBI spokesperson told ProPublica the bureau's earlier investigation found nothing implicating Collins or her campaign, Newsweek reported.
During the debate, Jackson drove his point home, saying, "I refuse corporate PAC money. I want to ban congressional stock trading. I fight for Mainers every day. I'm not taking money from corporations like Senator Collins does."