Susan Collins has an answer for everything, and it is always the same answer: completely false. This week ProPublica documented that the FBI spent years circling the senator, her top aides, and a pro-Collins super PAC, asking questions about Hawaii defense contractor Navatek and the donations it steered her way. Martin Kao, Navatek’s former CEO, pleaded guilty to campaign finance and loan fraud and told the FBI he exchanged campaign cash for government contracts — including a $150,000 contribution routed through a shell company to that super PAC, as American Oversight recounted, quoting Kao’s account that Collins told him privately in 2019: “you’ve got to pay to play.”

The FBI’s Washington anti-corruption squad concluded by late 2024 there was enough evidence for a broader bribery investigation of members of Congress. You know what happened to that investigation. It never began. President Trump came back and fired or pushed out most of the agents and lawyers working high-profile federal corruption cases. Yes, you read that right. The administration that promised to be tough on the deep state has found the one thing the deep state loves — a buried corruption file — and buried it. American Oversight is now investigating Patel’s FBI over the shelving. The corruption didn’t go away. It just stopped being inconvenient.

And Maine wakes up to the story a week later. Veterans groups held a press conference in Bangor demanding Collins respond. Maine Democrats — the same party that spent twenty years explaining why she was the good one — assailed her Wednesday, which takes real faith in the short memory of the electorate. A Portland Press Herald/Siena poll found 56 percent of Mainers now disapprove of the job she does, and the swing voters who used to buy the bipartisan act say the report moved them. She has held that seat nearly thirty years and never once ran for another office in her life.

Here is the thing about “completely false.” It was not written for the FBI, which knows exactly what it asked. It was written for Maine, which forgives anything from a senator who photographs well at lobster parties and chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee. Collins spends the week calling Trump’s spending illegal, which is true, from a woman whose own pay-to-play file the Trump administration conveniently never opened. Do not confuse her survival with innocence. It is a different thing, and it is running out.

I have said it before and the numbers keep proving it: Susan Collins’ time is up. The Houdini of Maine has one trick left — the hope that Mainers are too polite to read a ProPublica article all the way down. This time, with the pay-to-play file, the Epstein cleanings and more than two million dollars from AIPAC on the same front pages, politeness may not hold.