[laughs]

The super PAC disclosed the donation from the shell company, and people looking through the disclosures were immediately like, "What the hell is this?" A hundred and fifty thousand dollars from this society that has no website, has no other presence.

It's, like, the most obvious shell company pass-through of all time.

And, you know, Martin and others at the company and some people at the PAC embark on what can only be described as a coverup, where they begin to coordinate ways for the society to make donations to women in STEM to give scholarships.

And, um, you know, they made their attitude about this scheme pretty clear in emails.

Martin at one point said, "Whatever.

It's just a pack of bitches getting free money." So, you know, they had no kind of altruistic ideas or endeavors here.

Eric Schiff talked with William for a long time, about four hours straight.

So what hasn't Senator Collins answered at this point? If you were to see her and had the chance to ask her just one question about this, what would you say?

The big question I would ask Susan Collins is, how did you know that Martin Cowell made a $150,000 donation to your super PAC seven days after he did it using an anonymous shell company? I mean, someone feasibly would have had to communicate to her that this donation was made.

Cow met with the head of a pro-Collins super PAC who was actually friends with her husband and concocted a scheme to anonymously funnel $150,000 from a defense contractor to her super PAC, which on its own is illegal.

But before that donation even got disclosed by the PAC, we have an email that shows someone from the PAC reached out and said that Susan Collins wanted the phone number of Martin Cow so that she could call him and thank him.

No one has asked her that question.

She has not responded to that question.

And the campaign has not even denied that that phone call took place.

And in the course of your reporting, were you able to talk to people around the president about the decision to do this purge? And what happened in those early days in 2025?

Just explain to us the crux of the story that you reported on this Martin Cow guy who is currently sitting in federal prison and donations that he made to United States Senator Susan Collins and a PAC that was run in support of her.

yeah and thanks so much for having me um yeah the best way to explain it in brief is sort of like a two-part story right so there's one part which is about a hawaiian defense contractor um which is owned by previously owned by this guy named martin cowell um and susan collins and You know, to give a little bit of history, Navatek, this company, relied on Daniel Inouye, the legendary senator from Hawaii, to receive appropriations for the company so that they could do research for the Navy.

And Inouye died in 2012.

And that kind of set the company on this path where Martin had to figure out a new way to get congressional appropriations to fund the company's research.

And so what they do is they develop this strategy of targeting senators who sit on the Appropriations Committee.

And they're actually extremely successful.

And one of the senators that they focus on in their strategy is Senator Susan Collins.

Is it your understanding that the money that went to Navitek resulted in no actual work and no work product?

You also, we should note, that you have i-i correspondence about w- how he should structure it and put it in a shell company, which itself is a little dodgy.

We learned a lot about how this was set up and how this donation came to be.

Uh, you know, they had spoken to the Collins campaign and said, "If you need any more help financially or whatever, we're here to help." And that led to this meeting with the head of Collins super PAC, um, where they hashed out the deal to make this donation through a shell company, and they wanted to know that in return for this donation, they would get even more federal contracts from Susan Collins.

What turned this from the gross- the normal grossness of the transactional politics of the super PAC era to something maybe FBI wants to look in is that the individual at the heart of it said that it was quid pro quo.

The thing that really changed this investigation is that Cao gave a detailed confession to the FBI about not just his interactions with Collins, but many senators.

And the FBI first interviewed him in 2022, and then two FBI agents flew back to Hawaii in late 2024 to interview Cao again.

And FBI documents that we saw show that FBI agents were able to corroborate some of the claims that Cao told them.

So even though he is indeed a convicted felon, the FBI found him to be credible, and they were able to match the things that he told them with evidence that they collected via subpoena.

And what's your response to that statement?

Sure.

The agents were at the beginning of their probe looking into the interactions between Collins and her involvement with a Hawaiian defense contractor, a man named Martin Kao.

The Collins campaign says that we relied on Kao's word that's not accurate.

We conducted our own investigation, and the FBI, too, investigated some of Cao's claims, and they took them seriously.

Cao gave a lengthy confession to two FBI agents in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Honolulu in both 2022 and 2024, where he detailed his interactions with members of the Collins campaign as well as the Super PAC supporting her in what he alleged was a scheme in order to exchange contributions for contracts.

In your reporting, did you get the sense that no one at the Justice Department or the FBI is watching to see if such schemes are running rampant given the administration's dismantling of various anti-corruption units in the government?

You know, what we learned in our reporting is that the agents and prosecutors who do these kinds of cases are extremely careful and methodical.