Susan Collins's husband was paid by a lobbying firm last year. The only lobbyist at that firm was Scott Reed, the man running the super PAC that is spending to re-elect her.
Here is the whole thing in four facts, all from 2025:
- Chesapeake Enterprises, a Washington lobbying firm, paid Collins's husband, Thomas Daffron, consulting fees.
- Chesapeake's only registered lobbyist was Scott Reed, who also runs Pine Tree Results, the super PAC backing Collins.
- That year Reed was paid to lobby Congress for Hillwood, a data center developer chaired by billionaire Ross Perot Jr.
- Perot gave Collins $7,000.
Her husband and the firm
Collins's personal financial disclosure, filed in May, shows Daffron was paid consulting fees by Chesapeake Enterprises last year, according to American Journal News. Senate rules only require a senator to report that a spouse earned more than $1,000 from a source, not the exact amount, so we don't know how much he was paid.
Daffron is no stranger to the firm. He was Chesapeake's executive vice president from 2001 to 2004, American Journal News reported.
Who Scott Reed is
Reed is the man at the center of the alleged pay-to-play scheme ProPublica reported on September 22.
In 2019, the FBI looked into a large donation Reed solicited from Navatek, a Hawaii defense contractor. Navatek's former CEO, Martin Kao, who is now in prison for wire fraud, told investigators he gave the money understanding that Collins would help his company win millions in federal contracts, which she did. The investigation was dropped shortly after Trump returned to the White House. We laid out the whole Navatek story here.
Collins has questioned ProPublica's reporting, denied any scheme existed and publicly defended Reed. ProPublica stood by its story.
What Reed was lobbying for
Federal lobbying records show that Perot's Hillwood Investments paid Chesapeake $110,000 in 2025 to lobby the House and Senate on "Real Estate Investments": $30,000 in each of the first, second and third quarters, and $20,000 in the fourth. Every one of those reports lists Reed as the only lobbyist on the account.
Hillwood builds data centers. Facebook built a $1 billion data center at its AllianceTexas development north of Fort Worth, and the company has talked openly about gearing up for the AI data center boom. American Journal News counts at least six data centers now operating in the U.S. that Hillwood helped build.
And Perot gives to Collins
Federal Election Commission records show Perot gave Collins $7,000 on September 26, 2025, two maximum contributions routed through her joint fundraising committee, while his company was paying Reed's firm to lobby Congress. He also gave her $5,600 in December 2019.
None of this is illegal on its face. But it is exactly the kind of tangle the Senate's disclosure rules exist to expose.
Why the data center part matters in Maine
Data centers drive up electric bills, and voters have noticed. A New York Times/Siena poll found 61% of Americans oppose building them in their communities, and several Maine towns have passed moratoriums on new ones, American Journal News reported.
Collins has tried to get on the right side of that. She voted for the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill Republicans pitched as making big data centers pay their own electricity costs. Democrats called it toothless because it only required state regulators to consider such rules, and it failed in the Senate on September 30.
She's not the only Republican suddenly worried about data centers after a year of helping the industry. We counted eight more.
The bottom line
The same lobbying firm paid Susan Collins's husband and employed Scott Reed, who runs her super PAC, sits at the center of an FBI pay-to-play story she says never happened, and spent 2025 lobbying Congress for a data center billionaire who donates to her.
Source
American Journal News: "Collins' husband did work for data center lobbying firm"
