It’s no secret that President Trump is historically corrupt. In his first year back in the White House, Trump earned more than $2.2 billion — an astonishing and unprecedented figure — in part by leveraging the presidency to draw investors into his businesses. But one of the worst legacies that Trump will leave behind is not just his own brazen corruption, but his tacit encouragement of corruption by other elected officials.
Since 2025, the Trump administration has gutted and dismantled units within the Department of Justice and the FBI that are specifically tasked with investigating political corruption. As a result, enforcement of anti-corruption laws has taken a nosedive.
Here’s the latest known example: According to a recent investigation by ProPublica, the FBI was trying to launch a probe into Maine Senator Susan Collins and one of her top donors — potentially for a case involving criminal bribery. But after Trump returned to the Oval Office and unleashed a retribution campaign, which included purging the DOJ of anyone who had investigated him, the probe was dropped.
To be sure, just because the FBI investigates someone doesn’t mean that a crime was actually committed. Oftentimes, prosecutors don’t gather enough evidence to take a solid case to court. But in this instance, there’s ample evidence that federal law enforcement agencies did not do their jobs to the fullest extent.
According to the ProPublica investigation, the head of Collins’s super PAC, Scott Reed, wanted big donors to contribute to the senator’s 2020 reelection campaign. In a meeting, Reed asked executives from Navatek, a defense contractor, to make a sizable donation. In return, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, asked that Collins secure millions of dollars in federal funding for his company.
Because federal contractors aren’t allowed to make political contributions, and because what Kao proposed would amount to bribery — a literal quid pro quo — Kao funneled $150,000 to Collins’s super PAC through a shell company, and later told other executives that the senator would get the company $32 million in federal contracts.
The source of these allegations was Kao himself. Eventually, the feds caught on to the CEO, and in 2022 he was indicted by a grand jury for making illegal campaign contributions. In interviews with federal prosecutors, Kao told them about his scheme with Collins’s super PAC.
Collins’s office denied wrongdoing, according to ProPublica, saying that her campaign was not involved in the discussions between Kao and her super PAC. Her spokesperson also told ProPublica that “the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”
Still, there are signs that Collins was aware of the contributions. After the super PAC received Kao’s contribution, for example, one of the super PAC’s staffers emailed a Navatek lobbyist, saying, “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”
The story here is bigger than Collins; it’s about how soft this administration is on white-collar crime and political corruption. Because of ProPublica’s reporters, we now know of the whole Collins-Navatek saga. But how many people engaging in clear-cut criminal bribery are getting off scot-free?
Trump’s own corruption has already given Americans plenty of reason to lose faith in government. His undermining of federal law enforcement will make it even harder to restore public trust. How could the president, or any official in Washington, expect Americans to trust government when the Department of Justice is turning a blind eye to corruption?
In a system of checks and balances, the Trump administration shouldn’t be able to get away with this. And it’s precisely times like this when Congress should intervene. But given that Congress is controlled by Republicans, there’s little appetite to hold Trump accountable for bad governance.
Fighting corruption, however, should not be a partisan issue. After all, Democrats and Republicans alike have been guilty of corruption. Congress should ensure that federal prosecutors have the capacity to enforce anti-corruption laws and uphold public integrity. Lawmakers can do that by investigating the Trump administration’s gutting of public integrity units within the DOJ and figuring out just how much that has impacted federal law enforcement agencies’ ability to investigate political corruption and white-collar crimes. Those findings should be made public.
Regardless of party, lawmakers should make clear that the new norm the Trump administration has set is unacceptable — that there should be no room for corruption at any level of government. But if they don’t, then the constituents they claim to serve ought to vote them out.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.