U.S. Sen. Coons of Delaware received, then redirected donations from contractor who’s now in prison for illegal contributions

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U.S. Sen. Chris Coons received $18,700 in campaign donations years ago from the family of a Hawaiian defense contractor who is now in federal prison for making illegal campaign contributions to another senator.

Asked by WHYY News this week about the donations, Coons said his campaign quietly redirected the money from former Navatek CEO Martin Kao and his wife, Tiffany Lam, to four Delaware charities in October 2023.

A campaign aide to Coons said a June 2023 article from a Honolulu news site about Kao’s crimes and “pay-to-play politics” prompted the senator to reroute the money to the Delaware nonprofits. The Democrat is seeking a fourth term in November after handily winning his party’s primary race earlier this month.

“I have literally thousands of donors,” Coons told WHYY News by phone from Washington, D.C.

Coons said he might have met Kao at a 2019 fundraiser with other senators in Seattle, but “I do not remember him at all.”

Coons said that in the fall of 2023, after Kao’s arrest and conviction “was brought to the attention of my campaign team, they came to me and recommended giving the contributions to charity, and we acted quickly. But the arrest of someone in Hawaii — who I may or may not have met years before — is not something that I would regularly monitor.”

ProPublica delivers damaging report about Maine senator

WHYY News learned that Kao and his wife gave money to Coons this week, after nonprofit newsroom ProPublica published an investigative story about Kao’s ties to U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The story said Collins used her position on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee to help Navatek obtain lucrative contracts with a Maine naval base after Kao contributed to her campaign and political action committee.

ProPublica also reported that Navatek courted members of the Senate and House appropriations committees during the 2020 election cycle. Coons has been on the Senate Appropriations Committee since 2013.

WHYY News checked the Federal Elections Committee website for donations from Kao and his wife and found they gave $18,700 to Chris Coons for Delaware: $7,500 in the 2014 cycle and $11,200 in 2020 cycle.

Kao gave Coons a total of $10,600. His wife gave Coons $8,100.

Besides donating to Coons during that six-year period, Kao also gave to several other sitting members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, including Republican chairwoman Collins, who later trumpeted that she “strongly advocated” for Navatek to win an $8 million deal in 2019 in her state, as well as Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and the late Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.

Coons said he only knew the name Navatek because an aide briefed him before his interview with WHYY News this week and that no one from the company, now called PacMar Technologies, has ever asked him or his staff for anything.

“The most important thing here overall is first, that there’s a firewall between my campaign team and my campaign activity and my policy people,” Coons said. “This is not someone who just because he came and gave to a group of senators at an event in Seattle would then have had any reason to meet with my policy people.”

Kao and two other Navatek executives who did not donate to Coons were indicted in February 2022 for illegal contributions, conspiracy and other charges. Federal contractors are prohibited by law from donating to the campaigns of candidates for federal office. Kao pleaded guilty that September and was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison in October 2025.

Kao was also sentenced to 87 months behind bars in February 2025 for offenses that included defrauding the federal Paycheck Protection Program that helped businesses stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently incarcerated at the Yankton, a minimum security prison in South Dakota.

Coons: ‘The current campaign financing system stinks’

In October 2023, nearly a year after Kao pleaded guilty in both cases, the Coons campaign sent a total of $18,800 to four charities but did not announce the move publicly.

Federal Election Commission reports show that “Chris Coons for Delaware” gave $7,000 to West End Neighborhood House and Brandywine Counseling & Community Services. The campaign also gave $3,300 to the Food Bank of Delaware and $1,500 to the Delaware Agriculture Museum & Village.

Coons said his average campaign donation is $26 and that he has “thousands of contributors, a majority of them Delawareans,” but he also railed about the burden of raising money.

“One of the things that’s terrible about the current political environment is that senators, members of Congress, raise too much money to run for election,” Coons said.

He noted that candidates often “face the threat of super PAC-funded, last-minute dark money contributions to their opponents, and I think the amount of money that we end up raising to run for election, to run for reelection, is an unfortunate but necessary distraction from our work.”

Coons added that he supports caps on contributions, and public financing of campaigns, emphasizing that no amount of money influences how he votes or represents Delaware and the nation.

“The current campaign financing system stinks and it leads to members like me and many others going to event after event after event where they don’t even really know the people who are giving to them,” Coons said.

“If you set up your office right and you have systems in place, it doesn’t impact your policy work in your office. I am grateful for my chief of staff and my campaign team, who’ve worked very hard to make sure that nothing influences my policy work that is the result of a campaign contribution.”