Court Accountability, Anti-Corruption Orgs Demand Investigation Into Bribery in Congress After ProPublica Probe

Court Accountability, Anti-Corruption Orgs Demand Investigation Into Bribery in Congress After ProPublica Probe

Some politicians were hoping this scandal would stay under the radar

Court Accountability Action

Oct 28

With everything happening all at once, it was easy to miss this latest scandal that ensnares multiple members of Congress.

Last week, ProPublica followed up on their investigation of a sweeping bribery scandal between high profile members of Congress and federal contractor, Navatek.

As the outlet uncovered in an earlier story, former Navatek CEO Martin Kao and his associates contributed nearly $900,000 to politicians across party lines, while Navatek received more than $40 million annually in federal funding for work “of no real value.”

What’s worse (but wholly expected), Donald Trump dismantled the FBI and DOJ units investigating the alleged pay-for-play scheme, according to ProPublica’s research.

Instead of tackling this egregious problem head on, many members of Congress have remained silent.

It’s no surprise that public trust in government has been in steep decline, with trust in Congress among the lowest recorded in over 50 years. Through Citizens United, the Supreme Court led by John Roberts has permitted the disastrous glut of money in politics that erodes American democracy.

In partnership with several anti-corruption organizations, including the Revolving Door Project, End Citizens United, Public Citizen, and Campaign Legal Center, we’ve directed the following letter to Congress today demanding that they investigate this brazen corruption, strengthen federal laws for real accountability, and remove the corrupt influences of big money in politics facilitated by the Roberts Court.

Congress has the power and tools to restore public trust. They must use them.

October 28, 2026

Dear Chairs and Ranking Members:

We write on behalf of the undersigned organizations regarding ProPublica’s September 22 and October 20, 2026 pieces exposing a sweeping congressional bribery scandal as well as Donald Trump’s dismantling of the FBI investigation into it. The pieces describe a brazen pay-to-play scheme involving illegal campaign contributions, millions of dollars in federal research funding that produced nothing the military wanted to buy, and implicating elected members of both parties.

According to the reporting, by early 2025, FBI agents believed they had enough evidence to seek a broader bribery investigation of members of Congress. When Donald Trump reassumed office, however, his administration reassigned or pushed out many of the agents and prosecutors who had built the cases, dismantling the FBI’s anti-corruption squad while gutting the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. As a result, the case disappeared. But that does not resolve any questions about the underlying alleged misconduct that ProPublica brought to light.

Of course, ProPublica’s central source, former Navatek CEO Martin Kao, has been convicted of felonies and was seeking to reduce his sentence. The offices of the named elected officials have all denied the allegations. However, ProPublica says it independently corroborated much of Kao’s account with emails and company records. Those competing claims, as well as understanding the fuller scope and context of this and similar schemes, are precisely why Congress must investigate.

Whatever the ultimate facts about any individual member of Congress, and without regard to any current or past campaign or candidate, these stories expose numerous structural failures that implicate all three branches of government. In particular, these stories prove that the Supreme Court’s decades-long, laissez-faire approach to corruption has failed.

But Congress has the power and the responsibility to fix all this. We urge Congress to act on at least five fronts, as detailed below.

1. Take Up the Investigation and Hold Members Accountable

It is no surprise that Donald Trump and Todd Blanche will not investigate this wrongdoing. They lead the most corrupt administration in U.S. history. But Congress possesses its own investigative powers and should deploy them to further investigate ProPublica’s findings and, if corroborated, clean up this mess within its own ranks, starting now and into the 120th Congress. Given that those implicated span partisan lines, the investigation should be bipartisan and independent as well.

It should also move quickly, to prevent future elections, contracts, and other government business from being corrupted in the same way. Hence, in addition to any independent or expanded inquiry, Congress should demand from the Justice Department the complete Navatek investigative file as well as documentation concerning the dismantling of relevant investigative units and the firings or resignations of key personnel.

If the investigation we propose produces evidence of misconduct, it should carry appropriate consequences. First, there should be censures and loss of committee assignments. The least Congress can do is apply its own rules to achieve accountability.

Second, if the evidence supports it, Congress should make criminal referrals. The current Department of Justice should be forced to re-confront this scandal, and even if it continues to stonewall, a future DOJ may not. Indeed, Congress could investigate how and why this investigation was killed in the first place. Moreover, many states have anti-corruption and bribery laws that could apply here and be enforced now. There is no excuse to wait.

Third, the investigation should lead to serious legislative reforms that finally end the brazen corruption and bribery that have infected our political system.

Below are areas to start, though certainly not end.

2. Insulate the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Function From Further Political Interference

The ProPublica stories contain unsettling details about how the FBI team built to investigate public corruption was dismantled, with agents who had worked on politically sensitive cases fired or driven out, just as their work was reaching critical mass. It parallels the politicized firings of January 6, Mar-a-Lago, and other federal prosecutors and agents since the beginning of this administration.

A Justice Department that cannot reliably investigate and charge misconduct that erodes our democracy is anathema to that democracy. Indeed, federal law already bars government contractors from making political contributions, yet ProPublica reports that Navatek routed hundreds of thousands of dollars to lawmakers’ campaigns and committees using straw donors and a shell entity, in apparent successful pursuit of tens of millions in federal funding. This was not entirely a failure of the underlying statutory prohibitions; it was also a failure of enforcement, because the enforcers were sent home.

In response – among many other fixes to the Trump Administration’s illegal decimation of the federal workforce in general and the Department of Justice – Congress should:

• Enact statutory for-cause removal protections for career agents and prosecutors assigned to public corruption matters;

• Guarantee the independence and budget of the DOJ Inspector General, the Office of Special Counsel, and the Merit Systems Protection Board, to ensure fair investigations of employment actions;

• Require reporting to Congress and the public when corruption investigators or prosecutors are reassigned or terminated outside the normal personnel process;

• Strengthen the government’s ability to investigate shell companies and beneficial owners on meaningful timeframes; and

• Codify the wall between the White House and ongoing DOJ investigations that Watergate-era reforms first established and that this administration has torn down.

Congress should also make clear its understanding of the pardon power, which cannot be so broad as to swallow the rest of the Constitution and allow for the wholesale corruption of the entire government.

We are cognizant that many of these reforms are made more difficult by the Trump Administration’s lawlessness and the Supreme Court’s solicitude for the same, under the guise of the fabricated unitary executive theory. But that is no excuse for abandoning Congress’s constitutional oversight role, and the American people should know which branches of government are attempting corruption reform, and which are preventing it.

3. Strengthen Federal Bribery and Honest-Services Laws

The Supreme Court’s unprincipled narrowing of the definition of an “official act” in McDonnell v. United States, and the vagueness that continues to hang over honest-services fraud after Skilling v. United States, have all made it exceedingly difficult to prosecute the kind of influence-buying that ProPublica describes — where funding and access flow alongside campaign contributions, without an explicit quid pro quo, at least not without years of investigation and flipped witnesses.

In Skilling, the Court told Congress that it “must speak more clearly” when defining the conduct that constitutes corruption. While we disagree with the Court’s statutory interpretation, we agree that it is past time for Congress to take up its call.

Congress must pass legislation, building on earlier bills like the Honest Services Restoration Act (111th Cong.) and the Clean Up Government Act of 2011 (112th Cong.), that overrides these and other incorrect decisions, reinstating a commonsense, prosecutable definition of official acts. The reform should also clarify honest-services fraud with sufficiently precise statutory language to survive constitutional scrutiny and respect due process while still reaching pay-to-play arrangements of this kind.

These efforts will not only restore sanity to our corruption laws but also restore Congress’s rightful, constitutional role in saying what the law is.

4. Bar No-Bid Contracting Abuses

ProPublica’s reporting describes a contractor that allegedly translated political access into recurring, high-dollar federal funding with limited competitive scrutiny. The contractor also delivered research that, according to its own former CEO, was of no real value to the people who paid for it – despite this administration’s supposed disdain for waste, fraud, and abuse.

Congress should, among other efforts:

• Strengthen the Federal Acquisition Regulation to require independent verification of deliverables and staffing on federal contracts above a defined threshold;

• Require true beneficial ownership disclosure;

• Mandate disclosure of any communications between a contractor and a member’s office or campaign in the period surrounding an election or funding decision;

• Expand the Government Accountability Office’s authority to conduct retrospective, randomized audits of earmarked and directed funding;

• Buttress and enforce anti-earmarking reforms that members across the political spectrum have championed, and were easily evaded here; and

• Impose meaningful debarment and reimbursement consequences for contractors found to have used shell entities to evade the contribution ban.

5. Finally End the Money in Politics Casino Behind All of This

Behind these stories and so many like them is the Roberts Court’s disastrous Citizens United ruling. It permitted this sort of pay-to-play politics and rotted American democracy in the process.

Together with SpeechNow.org v. FEC, 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010) (en banc), the Roberts Court also created super PACs that can accept unlimited contributions, like the hundreds of thousands of dollars that ProPublica reports the chairman of a super PAC sought from Navatek. Worse yet, the Court couched its decisions in the First Amendment, cementing the belief that nothing short of a constitutional amendment can fix the problem. Accordingly, candidates of both parties, however much they might privately lament this grotesque, anti-democratic state of affairs, must play the game anyway or risk being left behind.

In sum, it is simply impossible to square these ProPublica stories with the Court’s assertion in Citizens United that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That statement was wrong at the time, and it is dangerously wrong now.

So what is Congress’s answer?

Following investigations into the campaign contributions at the center of this scheme – and the corroding of American politics as a whole – Congress must recommit to its duly enacted campaign finance laws, and expand them even further. It must also enact the reforms described in this letter, and more.

And finally, given the Supreme Court’s track record on these issues – not to mention its own corruption issues – Congress must use its constitutional authority to insulate these reforms from being gutted yet again, like Lucy with the football. There are many options for doing so. The only unacceptable option is doing nothing

Conclusion

These are not partisan proposals. ProPublica reports that the lawmakers the FBI was examining come from both parties, and Americans of all persuasion detest the current state of affairs. Nor are we claiming that any particular reform is a silver bullet or beyond discussion. The point is that the American people’s confidence that government business is done on the merits — not through shell companies, straw donors, and backroom deals in D.C. bakeries — has never been lower, and it will only plummet more following these articles. It is your job to fix that.

We hope you agree, and we welcome the opportunity to support the briefings, hearings, referrals, or legislative drafting that your committees will undertake to combat this scourge of systemic corruption.

Thank you in advance for taking up this urgent matter.

Sincerely,

Court Accountability

Revolving Door Project

End Citizens United

Public Citizen

Campaign Legal Center

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