Well, that didn’t last too long. Katie Zacharia became White House press secretary just five days ago, but after President Donald Trump told reporters she should “reconsider,” the New York Times reported she’d been fired Friday afternoon. 

Zacharia held the position for less than a week, but generated considerable controversy in that short time. Her first briefing on Tuesday lasted only 14 minutes as she took questions from just three reporters at Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail, appearing flustered and disorganized. Meanwhile, questions about her credentials took center stage, as she identified herself as a lawyer but in fact had never passed the bar exam. Her long history of pushing far-right conspiracy theories like QAnon also resurfaced. 

Then, Zacharia made two appearances on Fox News, both of which did not seem to go well. Sean Hannity grilled her on her false credentials Thursday night and told her, “I can give you some unsolicited advice. That’s never going to be a friendly room to you,” referring to the White House press pool. The next morning, she appeared on “Fox and Friends” and was asked if she still had the “confidence” of the president. “I-I-I’m standing here and I was able to travel with him through all of the midterm convention — or, excuse me — the midterm rallies, and I hope to be able to build the trust and confidence of everyone around me,” she replied.

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Apparently, she did not have Trump’s confidence. Speaking to reporters at the White House Friday, the president said he told her “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider.” He added that he would leave the decision to her, according to CNN, but said they would speak when he returned to the White House. “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this,” he said he told her. A few hours later, she was out. 

Numerous people online compared Zacharia’s short tenure was compared to Anthony Scaramucci, who was appointed White House Communications Director in 2017 during Trump’s first term, but just lasted 11 days. “To put it more precisely: a Zacharia is about .4 of a Scaramucci,” Anna Bower, a senior editor at Lawfare, posted on Blue Sky. The Mooch, as Scaramucci is popularly known, posted on X that “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”

Zacharia replaced secretary Karoline Leavitt, who resigned from the position in August.

😳 Zacharia flames out on Fox News for the second time in 12 hours 😳

With the wreckage still smoldering from her debacle on Hannity, Katie went on Fox & Friends and received another grilling from Fox hosts

LAWRENCE JONES: It’s been a tough week for you. Do you wish you would’ve disclosed to the president about not passing the bar?

ZACHARIA: Those questions weren’t asked

Here’s the whole segment:

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2026

The post Katie Zacharia was too incompetent even for Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, 28, the youngest person to hold the role, served as one of the biggest and most controversial mouthpieces for President Donald Trump, describing Democrats as “terrorists,” making “your mom” jokes and organizing a White House “media offender” list. In August, Leavitt announced her resignation, saying she wanted to focus on her family. In May, Leavitt took time off from work for the birth of her daughter. She also has a two-year-old son. 

Rumors swirled around her departure that it was due to Trump’s ruse of switching planes on the way home from a NATO summit in Turkey in July, with the president reportedly hiding in a catering truck and taking a different plane, Air Force C-32A, instead of the former Air Force One, like he claimed on social media. Those Trump brought with him included the president’s aides, like Natalie Harp, who fawns over Trump with love letters, body man Walt Nauta and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

On the might’ve-gotten-blown-up decoy plane were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the White House press pool and others. Leavitt announced her resignation only a few days after The Washington Post and The New York Times reported on Trump’s disappearing act. 

However, there’s no evidence she was even on the trip. Yet it doesn’t seem like Leavitt is going to be a full-time stay-at-home mom or trad wife either, as it was announced in early October that she will join Fox News next month as an on-air contributor. For nearly two months, it has been unclear who would replace Leavitt at the White House, but perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out to be another Fox News and Newsmax favorite.

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On Friday, Trump announced his new pick for White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, a 42-year-old conservative commentator and public relations liaison who frequently appears on Fox. Trump made the announcement on his website Truth Social, saying “She has an unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning. She is, likewise, a devoted fan and member of MAGA! I am confident that Katie will deliver strong results for our country as the next White House Press Secretary, as she has the respect of, and will work fantastically with, the media, the American People, and my administration.”

Zacharia will now be at the center of Trump’s administration as it navigates record low approval ratings, record high energy prices and entrenchment in the Iran war all before the November midterms. CNN reported the president sought Leavitt’s counsel before making a final decision and offering Zacharia the position. She is married to film producer Tyler Zacharia and they have four children. Zacharia’s most recent job was as a communications advisor for Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social. Before that, Zacharia worked as a deputy assistant secretary of Homeland Security for Public Affairs, starting in February 2026, but resigned just weeks later in March. 

She was allegedly ousted from DHS over her close ties to Corey Lewandowski, chief of staff to then Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who were alleged to be having a romantic affair together. Mocked as “Concentration Camp Barbie,” Noem saw the high-profile sieges of American cities she ordered attract negative media attention, especially when two protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal ICE officers in Minneapolis. Noem was summoned before Congress over those scandals and others, including her alleged misuse of government funds on television advertisements and private luxury jets. She was later fired by Trump, reassigned as “special envoy” for the Shield of the Americas, and replaced by Markwayne Mullin, who currently heads DHS. Noem filed for divorce in late September.

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Without Amy Miller, some elderly and disabled people wouldn’t be able to vote.

The attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska travels the state, investigating the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As she reminds the residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month, she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in the upcoming midterm elections. “He 100% knew who he wanted to vote for,” Miller said, but he struggled to write with a pen.

Congress funds her organization’s efforts to ensure that even people who might not have access to the internet or transportation have the opportunity to participate in elections.

Now a White House proposal threatens that work. 

The White House Office of Management and Budget wants to change spending rules to prohibit anyone from using federal grant money for voter registration drives or what it vaguely calls “related activities.” The office is headed by Russell Vought, who has long criticized the use of taxpayer money for voter registration efforts and who more recently used his position to cancel, freeze or redirect vast amounts of federal funding in defiance of Congress’ orders.

Miller, who has worked at her nonprofit for six years, said she’s never faced regulators wanting to impede her work.

“Shutting that down and making it more difficult for these Americans to access the ballot box is bewildering to me,” she said. 

The proposal is part of the Trump administration’s broader assault on federal efforts to expand access to voting, especially among groups that have historically faced discrimination and disenfranchisement. 

President Donald Trump has championed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to provide documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote, and that may require everyone to deliver that proof in person, which would effectively end voter registration drives. 

Last year, the Trump administration banned nongovernmental organizations from conducting registration drives at naturalization ceremonies, though the agency temporarily lifted the ban amid litigation over the policy change. The Department of Education also sent a letter to colleges and universities stating that they could not use federal work-study dollars to support voting-related work. (The directive has been contested.) Previously, those funds were used to pay students who had part-time jobs to conduct voter registration on campus and in neighboring communities.

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And on the first day of Trump’s second term, the president rescinded an executive order signed by Joe Biden that had directed federal agencies to expand opportunities for registration. Biden’s order acknowledged that some Americans, including Black citizens and people with disabilities, face historic and ongoing barriers to voting access. 

Neither Vought nor his office responded to ProPublica’s questions about the proposed change. But in a letter sent to state officials in 2022, he condemned Biden’s executive order as a “power grab” that would “increase voter registration and turnout, especially among Democratic Party supporters.” 

Vought’s proposed change, which wouldn’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterms, could have ramifications for the next presidential election well beyond voting accessibility. 

Nonprofits that receive government funds to help people sign up for Medicaid benefits, food stamps or other programs subject to the National Voter Registration Act are required to provide registration forms and help people fill them out. Like Disability Rights Nebraska, these groups would be caught between contradictory federal directives if the proposed ban is finalized.

Thousands more nonprofits receive federal funds for other services but provide voter outreach using private donations. Nonprofit experts said the confusion over which groups the ban affects and the burden of proving an organization is in compliance could lead many to pause or curb registration efforts ahead of the 2028 election. Colleges and universities that help students navigate registering to vote while away from home could be similarly affected.

But it is nonprofits like Disability Rights Nebraska and the people they serve that will be among the most directly hit.

“I don’t really think this rule had in mind that we are going to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. But it’s going to have that kind of effect,” said Rabia Belt, a Stanford law professor who’s an expert on disability and citizenship. 

In 2002, Congress helped tackle the challenges people with disabilities face in voting when it passed the Help America Vote Act. The legislation was designed to upgrade states’ voting systems and improve security in the wake of the controversial 2000 election, when close results in Florida triggered a recount, followed by lawsuits that ultimately ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to George W. Bush being declared the winner. 

The Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush, created grants to assist people with disabilities in registering to vote, casting their ballots and accessing polling places. That funding continues to this day. In recent years, Congress has budgeted $10 million a year, which is spread among 57 nonprofit groups that together cover every state as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Native American communities and U.S. territories. 

That funding has narrowed the gap in casting ballots between those with disabilities and those without, according to an April 2024 report from Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research that was written for the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel that helps implement the reforms put in place by the Help America Vote Act. 

But challenges persist when it comes to voter registration. During the 2024 election, 3.6% of registered voters with disabilities reported difficulties with registering, compared to 1.4% of registered voters without disabilities, according to survey data from Rutgers. That gap may sound small, but it is statistically significant and represents the experiences of about 740,000 registered voters with disabilities, said Douglas Kruse, one of the Rutgers professors who compiled the survey. 

The draft version of the OMB proposal was published in May. It is part of an extensive attempt to remake the rules governing federal grants. Once OMB’s final rule is released, it will almost certainly be subject to litigation. Legal experts said some lawsuits will likely focus on how the rule contradicts existing laws and policies, like the grants that were enshrined in the 2002 law and repeatedly approved by Congress.

Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the OMB for part of Biden’s administration, said the proposal disregards how the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse.” The legislative branch sets the budget and gives dozens of federal agencies instructions on distributing those funds; the agencies create detailed policies to select grant applicants and get the money out the door.

Vought understands that federal funding provides a tool to consolidate power into the White House, said Bagenstos, who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in disability and appropriations law. 

“This is not even a surgical power grab,” he said. “It’s just a massive across-the-board power grab.”

Disability Rights Nebraska was awarded $141,000 in voter accessibility funds this year. When the organization heard about the proposed rule, it submitted a public comment in opposition. Such a change “would affect the ability of nonprofits such as ours to conduct” voter registration drives, which are “an invaluable service to Nebraskans with disabilities who are otherwise locked out of the voting experience,” the group wrote. 

The organization’s work is strictly nonpartisan as mandated by law, the letter said. During a visit in June to a rural assisted living facility, the group wrote, 30% of the new voters its staff helped register identified as Republican, 20% as Democrat and 50% as nonpartisan or affiliated with a third party.

To ensure their drives are nonpartisan, Miller said she and her colleagues conduct the work in pairs, with each person representing a different party, as required by law. 

Many of the residents she speaks with are essentially cloistered, Miller said. 

She recalled one visit to a rural assisted living facility in early 2024. The community is so small it doesn’t have a library or a gas station. The nearest election commissioner’s office is a 30-minute drive away. 

Disability Rights Nebraska had put up a poster inside the building, listing key facts about voting access for people with disabilities. At one point, Miller said, a young man in a baggy T-shirt pointed at the poster. “Is this true?” He asked her. 

Yes, she told him.

“So I could register?”

“You can,” Miller said. “Do you want to register?”

He did. Miller said he knew what party he wanted to register with, though she declined to identify the party publicly or give personal details about him to respect his privacy. She said he told her he had lived at the home for a couple of years and this was the first time someone had offered to walk him through the registration process.

Miller said she wished the politicians making rules about voting rights could witness such moments.

“If I could just bring a politician with me to stand in the front hall of a nursing home” and see how people react when they realize they can vote again, she said. “I wish they could see that and realize how important the work is.”

The post “A massive power grab”: White House proposal threatens funding that helps disabled Americans vote appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump loves a good pardon. His generosity is so well known, in fact, that an industry of lobbyists, lawyers and other insiders has reportedly sprung up to facilitate clemency for wealthy criminals. Clemency, meaning mercy or leniency, lets the president reduce the punishment for, or even forgive, federal crimes.

The post Other presidents have let white‑collar criminals dodge financial penalties – but not like Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

In November 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” describing “Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering contributions to electrical science.” The exhibit explained that, prior to becoming an abolitionist, he had enslaved people in his household. “Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery,” it declared. 

The exhibit speculated that Franklin may have used enslaved people in his electrical research. “Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him,” stated the exhibit, which closed in 2025 but can still be found online. “Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”

It was an eye-catching conjecture: one of the most revered of the Founding Fathers subjecting people held against their will to possibly painful shocks. And it was one of many details singled out for criticism in a blistering 162-page White House report released in July that argued that the museum had fallen victim to an “ideological capture” that “moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

For decades, the Smithsonian Institution, which draws some 15 million visitors every year to its assemblage of 21 museums — bounty that has no real global peer — has managed to stay mostly above the political fray. There have been occasional exceptions, such as the uproar over the National Air and Space Museum’s planned 1995 exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By and large, though, the institution maintained bipartisan support as the guardian of America’s history, ingenuity and natural heritage, even as political polarization spread and culture wars raged. 

But that institutional exceptionalism is now imperiled as never before. In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the Smithsonian had succumbed to “divisive, race-centered ideology.” This July 4, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, came the White House report. Later in July, two House committees held back-to-back hearings on the report, where Republican members took turns lambasting the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, and forcing her to answer questions about exhibit items such as a “chrome and rubber crotch harness” designed for sadomasochistic sex. That week, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of the Interior to erect signs outside the museum “warning visitors about the ideological capture” on display there. The signs have yet to go up, but in late August, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sent a letter to the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents declaring that other federal agencies “cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership.”

The Smithsonian is independent of the executive branch, governed by a 17-member board led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and with six members of Congress, three from each party, serving with nine private citizens and the vice president. But it depends on the federal government for 62% of its funding, receiving more than $1 billion per year, and warnings of deep budget cuts have grown ever louder. Finally, on Sept. 8, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, the first African American person to lead the institution, announced he was stepping down at age 73, saying “it has been stressful.”

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Seen from one vantage, the battle over the Smithsonian is but another example of Trump attempting with characteristic bombast to put his stamp on Washington institutions, alongside shuttering the Kennedy Center, replacing the East Wing of the White House with a huge ballroom and planning a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery. 

But unlike some conflicts initiated by Trump, this one has been festering for years, independent of him, with complaints lodged by board members before he returned to office. The American history museum, the main focus of the administration’s ire, has wrestled for years with how, or even whether, it should present a unifying national narrative, an ambivalence that left it susceptible to the administration’s broadside. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian underwent a political awakening during the 2020 upheaval over the COVID-19 pandemic and murder of George Floyd that echoed responses in academia and other progressive realms.

This left it exposed to a new administration that viewed itself as a corrective against perceived woke excesses. “I said over and over again that there’s going to be a day of reckoning,” recalled Garret Graves, a Republican former congressman from Louisiana who served on the Smithsonian board in 2023 and 2024, in an interview. “You can either participate in it, help guide the Smithsonian back to something that makes more sense, or you can have an abrupt shift. I didn’t realize my words would ring as true as quickly as they did.” 

Now, in the year that was supposed to be a crowning celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Smithsonian is instead in Trump’s crosshairs. And the question of how the country’s premier history museum should tell the nation’s story is suddenly up for grabs.

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The National Museum of History and Technology opened on the National Mall in 1964. Its mission, said former assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Remington Kellogg that year, was to “awaken” a “clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States — its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.” As the name reflected, the museum contained duelling missions from the start, showcasing American technological advances and telling a more general historical story.

In 1980, it was renamed the National Museum of American History, but the tension lingered. “It started out as a technology museum, and even now it has a lot of equipment, and to move from that to American history, that’s a huge change,” said Ivan Selin, a former chair of the museum’s board. “Unless you’re going to throw everything out and start over again, you’re going to have a very incoherent thing. Unless you have a clear strategy, you’re going to have some apples and oranges.”

Two decades after the name change, the lack of a unified approach had become an issue. In 1999, David Brooks wrote a scathing critique in the Weekly Standard, lamenting that the museum had so little on display about the nation’s defining moments (the Constitutional Convention, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Great Depression, etc.) and prominent figures who shaped them (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., etc.). “It ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history,” he wrote. “This is a museum of multicultural grievance, which simply passes over any subject, individual, or idea, no matter how vital to American history, that does not have to do with the oppression of some ethnic outgroup or disfavored gender.” 

In 2001, in response to such critiques, the Smithsonian convened a blue-ribbon commission of historians and others led by Richard Darman, a former top aide in Republican White Houses. In 2002, the commission released its report, declaring that the museum “requires what its own leadership has described as a ‘transformation.’ It lacks aesthetic appeal, organizational coherence, and the perception of substantive balance.” The report recommended, among other things, a chronological introductory exhibit that contains “central theme lines for the examination and interpretation of American history” and that “should celebrate America’s remarkable strengths and achievements while also treating fairly and responsibly the ways in which America may have failed to meet the high standards it has proclaimed for itself.”  

This would prove easier said than done. For one thing, the museum’s physical structure itself has never been coherent — “an awkward attempt to marry the classical and the modern, the building is legitimately neither,” wrote New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable at its opening. “It’s a challenging space,” Brent Glass, who became director shortly after the blue-ribbon report in 2002, told ProPublica.

Above all, though, the commission’s recommendations faced resistance among the museum’s curators to the sort of great-man-of-history approach that Brooks and others were hankering for. There had been a trend in museum science away from this, and away from straight chronology. “There was this whole museum movement to get away from a march through time, to a more episodic or specific sort of story,” John Gray, who succeeded Glass in 2012, told ProPublica. “It wasn’t done to get away from the story; it was finding a way to get people interested.”

In addition, the museum’s curators tended to be specialized in material culture — collecting and studying the museum’s several million objects and artifacts — rather than in conceptual storytelling. To make up for this, Gray’s team tried to enlist several leading academic historians to instill more of an overarching narrative structure. But they declined, saying they were concerned that such an approach could seem triumphalist and provide fodder for an America-first agenda. “We tried to organize [the museum] around ideas and ideals, ideals that were aspirational,” Gray said. “And we failed many times.” 

The museum’s eventual solution was to divide the national story into subject areas, each represented by a standing exhibit: “American Enterprise” on business and innovation, “American Democracy” on politics,” “Many Voices, One Nation” on immigration, “The American Presidency,” “The Price of Freedom” on the nation’s wars, “Entertainment Nation” on culture, “America on the Move” on transportation.

Developing these required extensive debate, said the former directors. Some donors supporting the enterprise exhibit were upset that it devoted so much space to the role of slavery in American business. In crafting “The Price of Freedom,” the museum consulted with veterans’ groups to try to avoid a backlash like the one that arose on the Enola Gay. This effort succeeded, Glass said, despite the exhibit’s candor about the darker elements of the nation’s military history. “People can handle complexity,” he said. “They don’t feel bad about the country when told the whole story, and they’re grateful that they have access to the information.”

Scattered throughout the museum are countless highlights: the desk on which Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence; the top hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre on the last night of his life; the actual lunch counter from the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, Civil Rights sit-in; and, in a recent addition, a gunboat sunk during the Revolutionary War that is being restored on-site. But the overall effect can be disjointed and disorienting. And, with the museum’s dim lighting, dated technology and underutilized areas, it can feel at times as if one is wandering in a past-its-prime shopping mall or in the forgotten corner of an airport terminal.

It’s a stark contrast to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which opened in 2016 under the direction of Bunch and, notably, has a clear chronological design. Of course, said Selin, the former American history museum board chair, the African American museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004, have the advantage of a more focused subject, leaving it even less clear what remains for the American history museum, where attendance has declined in recent years. “You can find nowhere in any Smithsonian document a theory of what should be in the American history museum or the more particular museums or how many of these particular museums there should be,” Selin said. “There’s no charter whatsoever that says how they fit together.”

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In March 2020, the Smithsonian shuttered its museums for the pandemic. A few months after that, Washington and other cities erupted in protests over Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Bunch, who became secretary of the Smithsonian in 2019, and other top officials embarked on a push to rethink the institution’s priorities, as reflected in the minutes of the Board of Regents meetings, which were now being held online. Bunch “briefed the Regents on his efforts to navigate the dual pandemics caused by the Coronavirus and issues surrounding race, racism, and racial identity,” the minutes of the June 2020 meeting stated. He announced the launch of “Smithsonian Cares,” a digital resource that would “provide tools and guidance to empower and inspire conversations about diversity, equity, access and inclusion.” 

That October, the board discussed “the potential creation of a Chief Diversity Officer position, a review of organizational processes and policies that may have inadvertently created barriers to inclusivity, integrating and standardizing DEAI training across the organization, strengthening supervisory DEAI skillsets, increasing senior leadership’s focus on inclusivity, and identifying funding and resourcing strategies to implement DEAI efforts across the Institution’s functions and operations.” In February 2021, Bunch told the board that the Smithsonian’s five strategic priorities would include positioning it as a “trusted source for critical conversations and helping the nation grapple with important issues like race and identity.”

As the meeting minutes show, the institution’s elevation of identity was being encouraged by the newly installed Biden administration. In October 2021, the Smithsonian’s Office of Government Relations reported that the Smithsonian had “brought objects from the National Museum of American History to the White House for a temporary display recognizing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Month.” Three months later, the office stated that it “continues to work closely” with the White House on “diversity, accessibility, access and inclusion efforts.” The Smithsonian noted plans for exhibits at the White House to mark “Black History Month in February, Women’s History Month in March, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, LGBTQ in June and Hispanic History Heritage Month in September.”

The post-2020 shift extended to the various museums, which started to reopen to visitors in spring 2021. To cite just one example, the National Portrait Gallery revised the signage for a portrait of Henry Laurens, South Carolina’s delegate to the Continental Congress, to reflect that he had made his wealth through chattel slavery. “When Floyd was killed, everyone acknowledged that now is the time to ask: What are the stories that we’re telling and were we being honest and fair in recounting those stories? We all looked at it through this lens,” Kim Sajet, who became the director of the Portrait Gallery in 2013, told ProPublica. “Everyone felt energized by that. We can’t change the past, but we need to acknowledge what happened in order not to repeat it in the future.”

But the new direction caused misgivings for some conservative supporters of the institution, such as Graves, who joined the regents as one of the three Republican congressional appointees in 2023. Graves told ProPublica that he had high regard for Bunch — “his accomplishment with the African American museum was remarkable” — but that he became worried that the Smithsonian was operating within a bubble. Its staff were living in a metro area that had voted overwhelmingly against Trump (and museum employees are generally among the most left-leaning of any profession), yet they were charged with presenting exhibits to visitors from all over the country and the world, a disconnect that the institution seemed insufficiently aware of. 

Many board meetings would kick off with tours of a certain museum, and Graves and a fellow Republican appointee, Adrian Smith of Nebraska, would often be taken aback by what they saw. “Seventy-five percent of the time Adrian and I would be walking around and say, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Graves said. “It wasn’t interpreting science or history. It seemed to have an agenda, and that’s not what a museum should be.” What was missing, he said, was a sense of the nation’s achievements. “This country is a remarkable experiment,” he said. “We’ve had some grave sins, but my gosh, America is a net victory for the world. It’s unbelievable what happened here in 250 years and it’s worth celebrating.”

Graves retired from Congress at the end of 2024. In his farewell address to the regents that October, he warned against allowing the Smithsonian to become seen as affiliated with one party or ideological bent. “I felt like they were causing sustainability problems for the institution,” he said. “Politicizing the Smithsonian is an awful, awful idea, because then you only receive funds when there’s a Democratic majority. This is America’s museum and there should not be anything partisan about it.” 

One week later, Trump won the election to return to the White House.

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In his first term, Trump largely ignored the Smithsonian. In 2017, Bunch gave him a tour of the new African American museum, which Bunch recounted later in his memoir: “The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade. As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking.”

It took little time for Trump to make clear that, as on other fronts in his second term, things would be different this time around. First came the March 2025 executive order, which directed Vice President J.D. Vance to rid the Smithsonian of “improper ideology.” Two months later, Trump said that he was firing Sajet at the Portrait Gallery, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.” The Smithsonian noted that Trump did not have the authority to remove Sajet, but she left anyway, hoping to spare the institution.

In August 2025, the White House issued a 120-day ultimatum to replace “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions,” but with little follow-up, and for nearly a year, it looked as if the storm may in fact have passed. Then came the White House report on the American history museum, with such an exhaustive litany against Hartig, its director since 2018, and Bunch that it made plain the authors had been scouring their public statements and the museum. (Through a spokesperson, Bunch declined to be interviewed. Museum representatives did not respond to requests to speak to Hartig.) 

In addition to citing the Franklin exhibit, the report noted that an exhibit called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” had included “the pages of a 6-year-old girl’s diary where she expresses fear about ‘getting boobs’ and wishes for her nonexistent ‘penis to grow.’” Another exhibit, on gay history, had “included a two-piece chrome and rubber crotch harness designed for sadomasochism.”

It criticized the museum for having trained staff using the “Museums as a Site for Social Action Toolkit,” a 200-plus-page roadmap on how to “truly transform the museum space,” which is linked “with white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, abuse of labor, colonization, imperialist theft of art and artifacts, destruction or absencing of alternative ways of interpreting or representing art and artifacts, structural racism and other oppressions.” 

Above all, though, the report criticized the museum on grounds that echoed Brooks and the 2002 blue-ribbon commission, saying that it failed to offer visitors a unified narrative of the nation’s history. “That story should be a basic consensus view that is not ideological or politicized, but presents the facts of history — what actually happened — as accurately as possible with minimal present-day bias,” the report stated. “It should tell the whole story of a nation, including the good and the bad, so Museum visitors can understand the development that led our nation to where it is today.”

For years, the Smithsonian had avoided major conflagrations partly by engaging in what one former official called the “care and feeding” of members of Congress on the two committees with purview over it, Appropriations and House Administration. If there was a potentially controversial exhibit, the museum would bring members over for a preview tour, so they had some context for complaints they might receive. But these efforts were on hold for a while because of the pandemic closures, and the Smithsonian’s government relations office experienced heavy turnover, as one of its directors had cancer and another died suddenly.

This context, combined with the fuel provided by the White House report, helped explain the level of vitriol that Hartig faced when she appeared at the two hearings in late July. Even by the standards of today’s decorum-less Congress, the hearings were wild affairs. At the first, held by the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Chair Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, kicked things off by playing a lengthy string of video clips of Hartig offering tribal land acknowledgements at the start of her speeches. “I’m wondering, have you ever planned on deeding any of your personal property or property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes?” he asked Hartig.

She adopted a conciliatory tone, saying the Smithsonian “takes the concerns raised in the White House Domestic Policy Council’s report seriously” but that “it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum.” She assured the committee, “I love the United States of America. I consider it the privilege of my career to help preserve its treasures and serve the American people.”

This did not assuage committee Republicans. Burchett displayed museum images including the crotch harness and the diary mention of the 6-year-old girl wishing for a penis. “Ma’am, I mean, you have pictures of bondage. You have some overtly sexual things up there,” he said. “I’m not a fan.” Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, pressed the point: “Are images of sexual fetishes appropriate for children? Yes or no?” Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, noted that the toolkit that the museum used for staff training had referred to “politeness” as a feature of “white supremacy culture.”

Those defending Hartig were hardly less outspoken. David Blight, a Yale historian also testifying, compared the White House’s attacks on the Smithsonian to the German Third Reich, saying “their model may indeed be Joseph Goebbels’ committee on enlightenment, which is what the Nazis called their committee that tried to control museums.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, opened her remarks by saying, “Welcome to the White Pride Committee.” Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Maryland Democrat, vowed to sacrifice his life for the Smithsonian. “We will not let you destroy that museum,” he said. “No matter how long it takes, how many battles are required, how much effort is needed, we will not allow that to happen unless you find a way to kill all of us and walk over our bodies to change history.”

The next day’s hearing, before the House Administration Committee, was more of the same. The bipartisan consensus around the Smithsonian appeared to lie in tatters.

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On a recent Sunday, a group of visitors made their way into the centerpiece exhibit at the National Mall entry to the history museum, the giant Star-Spangled Banner that was flying over Fort McHenry in 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write what became the national anthem. For safe-keeping, the flag is displayed in very low light, giving the chamber a sacred feel, like a cathedral crypt. “Oh my god, it’s huge,” said one woman. “I am shivering,” said another. “It’s insane,” said a third.

Every day, the museum, for all its imperfections, still makes a strong impression on many visitors. But its longstanding search for identity helped make it a target for an administration looking for weak spots, and now its future and that of the entire Smithsonian hangs in the balance. Three of the nine citizen slots on the Board of Regents are vacant, and three more will be next month. Whoever the remaining members of the board — which include Vance — select to fill those slots will help determine who is chosen to replace Bunch as secretary, and the institution’s future course. Much will depend on how much Chief Justice John Roberts, at the head of the board, decides to engage.

Any large institution can benefit from reassessment, and the Smithsonian and the American history museum in particular may well be overdue, especially as yet another focus area is about to be cleaved off, for the National Museum of the American Latino, scheduled to open early next decade. What gives so many supporters pause is for that reevaluation to happen under Trump, who hasn’t shown a lot of interest in how the various museums interact, much less in the nuances and subtleties of history.

“There will be a moment,” Sajet said, “when the American people will have to stand up and decide, is this what they want?”

The post How the Smithsonian became the latest front in Trump’s culture war appeared first on Salon.com.

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.

For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.

Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.

But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.

To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.

After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.

Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.

Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.

What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.

Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.

Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.

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Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.

Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.

Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.

Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.

The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.

Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.

The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”

Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.

ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.

Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.

Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.

Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.

“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”

Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”

She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.

“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”

In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.

Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.

Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”

But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.

Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”

The Navatek Method

Before Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters.

The company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled “King of Pork” steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Dan.” “Before Inouye took an interest, Congress didn’t even know our companies existed,” a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.

In response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up “a minority” of Navatek’s revenue.

Inouye’s death in 2012 made the company’s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek’s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.

Kao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek’s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.

Kao was an unusual figure among the company’s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be “a beast or a bitch,” a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him — one time, in the middle of the night. “He had very little interest in the technology,” one former employee recalled. “Martin was only interested in dollar signs.”

Kao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.

Despite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.

Navatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment or bespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.

Soon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member’s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the “specialty” of certain lobbyists.

Separately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek’s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.

Kao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek’s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.

“I’m not red or blue, I’m green,” he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.

While a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.

Often, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek’s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for “hybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,” “electric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls” and a “test bed for autonomous ship systems.” Although Navatek’s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.

Once the budget passed, lawmakers’ staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office — and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. “There’s only so many battles you can fight,” one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek’s projects made little sense.

Inside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as “the method.” And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.

“It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. “I’ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, ‘Well, let’s keep reaching.’ And so we did.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao’s “unethical and illegal method of winning contracts” was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao’s ownership.

Kao boosted Navatek’s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.

Even Navatek’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” Schiff said.

The key players in Kao’s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. “That is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,” Kao later told the FBI. “Sometimes for a 15-minute meeting.”

But the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers’ assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as “fundamentally transactional” and having “a reputation as a pay-to-play office.”

In another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek’s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.

“Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale.”

Eric Schiff, former Navatek executive

Winer was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer’s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show “House of Cards” who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.

In another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: “Would that ‘help?’”

Winer, who had already donated himself, replied, “With my contribution, I think it sends the right message.” He suggested Kao split up his donation to be “less conspicuous.”

The method didn’t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.

“You should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,” Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.

Winer said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao’s arrest. “The political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,” Winer said in an email to ProPublica. “I never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.”

Strategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.

Navatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. “You would be like, ‘Oh, there’s this senator walking around,’ and we would get a picture with them,” one engineer recalled.

While some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek’s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, “We thrive in the valley of death,” the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.

The Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.

In Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the “slamming” impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine’s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world’s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.

“[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,” recalled one who worked on the project. “The boats weren’t delivered to the Navy — the Navy didn’t even want them.”

Kao to Collins: “Here to Help”

The first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.

Collins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions — in this case, just a few thousand dollars — it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao’s support.

Navatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead — a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.

To work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.

In that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.

In an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.

“I did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,” Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, “I never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.” Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was “wholly inaccurate” to say Mandigo was close to their office.

FBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins’ inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.

The FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek’s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it should send the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails — with her scheduler and her campaign’s finance director — freely mixed talk of Navatek’s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.

The principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company’s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins’ team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father — which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors — and sent them his father’s full name and address.

“This is perfect,” Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father’s contribution. “We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!”

Before the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, “You’ve seen me deliver,” he told the FBI.

Less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek’s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser — who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract — four days later, saying, “Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.”

“I’ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute ‘needs’ come up,” he continued. “We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever.”

Kao’s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins’ campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.

The super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with “urgency.” At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC’s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. “They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,” Kao reassured him. “Thanks for doing this,” Reed replied.

The FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One, David Kring, the company’s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.

The other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just “a get to know you meeting” with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the “particulars of a donation.” Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao’s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.

A few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins’ office and secured a new round of funding.

“We were very warmly received,” Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. “Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals.

Navatek’s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.

Other documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.

Kao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.

“It was working well, and it would have continued to work well,” said Schiff, the former executive. “Martin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.”

Downfall, Cover-up

In early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of “Scientist.”

This was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.

The center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao’s wife’s name on the society’s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.

Inside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations — preferably in Maine — which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. “I want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed — giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,” wrote Mitchell. “That would help both of us, I think.”

Mitchell added, “We should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.”

Mitchell, who later played a major role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.

Kao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts — that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.

But Navatek’s and Kao’s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek’s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.

“This is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,” Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao’s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao’s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.

Loui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao’s tenure who were “not capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.”

“The company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao’s arrest, nor should it,” Loui added. “What Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.”

On Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek’s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company’s IT staff to copy the company’s internal servers.

Navatek’s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltrating the National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.

The agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek’s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.

They zeroed in on Kao’s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao’s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.

The government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer — including over email — was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. “Whatever… just a pack of bitches getting free $,” he wrote.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.

He began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.

Kao faced nearly a decade in prison. “My world and life imploded,” he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. “I was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was….‘smart business.’”

Over the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. “It takes two to tangle,” he told them.

Taxpayers funded Navatek’s entire political operation, Kao said. “Most companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,” he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.

For their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek’s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.

Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.

Both Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins’ inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins’ campaign manager, referred questions to the senator’s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.

Earlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.

By late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica.

Before they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign.

Ball and Gounaud worked for the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.

Ball was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had “weaponized” the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.

Trump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit’s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.

Before Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.

Based on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The post The FBI anti-corruption squad was circling Susan Collins — Until Trump got in the way appeared first on Salon.com.

The president is going after the press again.

The post When presidents ban journalists, the First Amendment is not the only constitutional right at stake appeared first on Salon.com.

Humans are probably the only species on Earth that actively fantasizes about its own extinction — and definitely the only one that actively participates in it. Even that whole thing about lemmings running off cliffs is a myth, but we bald-ish primates not only turn existential doom into entertainment (consider the entire post-apocalyptic genre writ large) or religious movements, we constantly invent new ways to derail our global society and put all of us at risk of mass death. 

The latest serious entry to this category is artificial intelligence, which isn’t actually intelligence, nor does it reflect a brand new fear. But the dramatic advancements made in AI over the last several years has finally made it something that scares people almost as much as nuclear weapons or the hand of God. Will AI truly become an agent of mass destruction? Nobody actually knows, but that isn’t stopping people from making some outlandish bets. 

This situation has been made worse by the heads of AI companies warning or threatening the public that the tools they’re developing could do more than just eliminate everyone’s job: it could take out humanity itself. We are drowning in tech-bro manifestos that simultaneously uphold AI as a miracle technology and a terrorist’s wet dream, all of it so steeped in marketing lingo that it’s difficult to parse how threatening or auspicious it actually is.

Meanwhile, our president boasts in all-caps rants that a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” is all we need to regulate this technology, which for most people is literally the opposite of reassurance, as with his insistence that AI apocalypse is a “hoax.” Donald Trump has also been playing the old-fashioned Red card, saying that any attempt to rein in AI, it will only help China get ahead in the race. “Whoever wins with AI wins,” Trump told reporters during his weekend jaunt to Ireland.

What are we trying to win, exactly? That isn’t clear. Is it control of self-replicating armies of autonomous drones, or a cancer-free utopia that hits Type II on the Kardashev scale? For now, both options are well within the realm of fantasy, though the former is much less so. All of this rests on assumptions that the current technology, built on so-called large-language models, will develop into artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical computer system that surpasses human intelligence in all domains. Keep in mind that there’s no hard evidence that LLMs, which are essentially souped-up versions of the predictive text algorithm on your phone, are going to assemble into something so complex and godlike. 

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The leaps required to go from AI to AGI are massive, nonlinear and still very theoretical. But fearmongers are jumping even further ahead and saying that once AGI exists, it could mean curtains for the human species. It’s wise to be skeptical of hypotheticals stacked on hypotheticals. The argument over what to do about this ranges from doubling down on AI development with zero regulation to burning down all the data centers. MAGA is basically warning us not to let the Chinese Communist Party get its grubby hands on the tech first: Shut up and trust Big Tech, or “Let Data reign!” Plus, the AI boom is totally not a bubble! Don’t even consider that all the adrenalized rhetoric might be about keeping the stock market adrift and less about the actual utility of AI.

Perhaps where one stands on the issue depends on how deeply they internalized “The Terminator” or “The Matrix.” Regardless, none of us asked to be in this AI race. Why isn’t cooperation with China a bigger consideration? We can imagine algorithms with godlike intelligence but not AI diplomacy? The whole thing smacks of Cold War déjà vu.

Sure, it’s probably logical to dread the future AI could bring, arguably if it leads to the collapse of late-stage capitalism. Maybe it’s past time to examine what we’re actually afraid of and why, rather than making assumptions about what AI can or can’t do, especially in the future. After all, it’s just a technology, a tool — which means it’s also a weapon in the wrong hands. Indeed, AI has already been widely used in warfare, from U.S. strikes on Iran to fully autonomous drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. It’s not hard to imagine this situation getting worse, but don’t forget who’s in control. As my colleague Alex Galbraith has argued, “CEOs can’t take credit for the successes of A.I. while avoiding the negative externalities. They’re both the results of real decisions made by actual thinking people. The blame for any harm the technology inflicts should lay with its creators.”

If tech bros are saying that AI might someday break containment and take down civilization, that sounds like an accountability sink coupled with an investor pitch. Maybe it’s Silicon Valley that should be scared we’ll call their bluff, or imprison their executives, for whatever crimes may someday occur. But why do we latch onto the fears they sell us? Maybe it’s embedded human instinct, an afterglow of developing self-awareness of our own mortality, to consider existential risks. That impulse certainly dates back before the time of Jesus, but with the advent of the atomic era, apocalypse is actually possible, though that prospect has less to do with the nightmare scenarios of the Book of Revelation than with the military-industrial complex. Yet fears about AI dominate the discourse while bigger and more imminent threats go largely unacknowledged.

There’s a strange religious tone to all of this, as pointed out by AI researcher Timnit Gebru in a Wired interview last week. What’s “really existential,” she said, “is AI powering autonomous weapons, killing machines, that are actually being used in warfare. The climate catastrophe is a real thing that could be exacerbated by what these tech companies are building. Bosses are using AI as an excuse to get rid of their pesky workers. This machine-god narrative is, in my opinion, meant to distract us from these. The industry has become a mix of cults, a mix of people who are true believers, just like a preacher who says the end times is coming. The singularity has been coming for decades now.”

Considering the massive and growing deadly impact of air pollution, heat waves, freak floods and other disasters, the No. 1 existential threat to humanity remains climate change, which is on track to get much worse by mid-century. Global heating is driven overwhelmingly by the fossil fuel industry, yet in the U.S. we’re regulating that less stringently than ever, with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing on Monday the repeal of rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions of coal and gas plants. Of course the AI industry is linked to all that through the destructive appetite of data centers, but if we think that only imaginary killing machines can wipe out most of human civilization, we need to think again. We’re already well on the way to doing that.

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