from the corruption-everywhere dept

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.

Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.

“Shoot all he has to really do is stop by and say ‘yes,’” Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. “That should only take a minute and he’s on his way. We don’t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.”

At the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot.…