The FBI was investigating South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn for a massive pay-to-play bribery scandal involving a Hawaiian naval defense firm. Then the FBI eliminated the team working on the case upon President Trump’s return to office.
New reporting from ProPublica details the dealings of the South Carolina politicians with Navatek executives including CEO Martin Kao, who told the FBI that he was exchanging campaign donations and gifts for millions of dollars in naval contracts.
In March 2020, the late Senator Graham met with Navatek lobbyists at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C, and made a deal to give a $10 million government contract to Navatek in exchange for $100,000 in campaign donations, on top of the $40,000 he charged just for the meeting, according to Kao.
“This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Graham allegedly told Kao.
Clyburn, one of the highest ranking Democrats in the House, also met with Navatek leaders—and asked them to match Graham’s campaign gift of $100,000 in exchange for political favors. Fellow South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican, also allegedly made cash-for-contract dealings with Navatek.
Kao was eventually arrested for campaign finance violations in September 2020 and confessed to federal agents that Navatek’s entire business model relied solely on bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts. The agents working on the case told their superiors their investigation could eventually include the lawmakers involved, but they were fired as the Department of Justice took revenge on the public corruption team, which previously investigated Trump.
This reporting from ProPublica is a continuation of its investigation into Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, who also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Navatek in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. Collins’s PAC received $150,000 from Kao right after their own D.C. restaurant meeting in 2019, and two months later, he informed Navatek that Collins committed to giving it $32 million in naval contracts.
This had the potential to be one of the biggest political corruption scandals of the modern era, a tangible exposé as to just how much influence lobbyists actually have in Washington, and how eager our self-interested politicians are to take money from them. And the FBI knew that. But as soon as Trump returned to office in 2025, the case was killed. This move inadvertently prevented a bipartisan whale of a corruption scandal from fully coming to light. And while Kao remains in jail, none of the powerful senators the FBI was investigating have faced any kind of repercussions—thanks to Trump. The team can’t even file a new case.
“You gotta hand it to Trump: he holds the consistent position that, Republican OR Democrat, bribery is not a crime,” journalist Matthew Chapman wrote on X. “He’ll cook up any number of bogus charges to take down his political enemies. But he’ll never go after bribery, even if it’s his enemies doing it.”
Kao has made political donations to dozens of politicians from both parties, including Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Jeanne Shaheen, and Tulsi Gabbard. Clyburn, Graham, and Wilson’s offices all deny Kao’s quid pro quo allegations.