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The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way

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Beatrice Caciotti for ProPublica. Source images: U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ official Facebook page. 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. M...
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Watch: The New Supreme Court

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Source image: Bryan Dozier/NurPhoto via AP The Supreme Court continues to make consequential rulings in the shadows. I analyzed tens of thousands of case files from the court’s online archives , parsing through filings to separate simple requests for deadline extensions from challenges to long-established constitutional rights. I discovered that in the term that ended in 2025, the justices issued more substantive decisions on their emergency docket than in cases argued in open court. Experts told me this was likely the first time this has happened in the court’s modern history.  Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to my questions.  Since I reported that story in July, more major rulings have been made on the emergency docket, often called the “shadow docket,” where justices rarely hear arguments and often issue unsigned orders that don’t explain how they arrived at their decisions or even how they voted. These decisions are continuing to...
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“Our Dear Friend Umar”: How We Uncovered That a Russian Oligarch Bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s Wedding

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Photo collage by ProPublica. Source images: Laura Gordon Photography, Telegram. My colleagues and I had been digging for days. We’d heard a rumor that a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin named Umar Kremlev had attended Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding this past May in the Bahamas. But to confirm that, we needed visual proof.  First, we scoured everything the Trumps had released from the event, held on a pair of private islands. On social media and in the pages of tabloids such as Page Six and Hello! magazine, official photos from the weekend showed an intimate chapel ceremony alongside lavish beach parties. Several photos depicted guests, including Jared Kushner and Eric Trump, and we scanned them all for signs of Kremlev. Still, nothing had turned up yet. We then turned to Kremlev’s social media profiles on the off chance that he’d posted about the wedding. Incredibly, on Telegram, Kremlev had posted videos over the same weekend as Trump Jr.’s wedding ...
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