Susan Collins – Media Nation

The New York Times came thisclose to having the Graham Platner rape story. So what happened?

With the meltdown of Graham Platner’s U.S. Senate candidacy still playing out, I want to take a look at how The New York Times let it slip away.

The pieces are clearly visible, so you may already know where I’m going with this. But it’s worth tying them together and asking how the Times could come so close to breaking it wide open only to be relegated to the sidelines while Politico delivered the final blow.

If you value news and commentary like this, please sign up for free email delivery of new posts — and consider becoming a supporter for just $6 a month. Supporters receive a weekly email with exclusive content.

Early Monday afternoon, rumors began spreading on social media that a big story was about to break. Platner, a Maine Democrat, was reportedly canceling campaign events. Then it dropped: Politico published an interview with Jenny Racicot, a 41-year-old Maine woman, who claimed that in 2021 Platner entered her home and drunkenly, violently raped her.

Continue reading “The New York Times came thisclose to having the Graham Platner rape story. So what happened?”

In April, Graham Platner was asked if he had anything else to hide. His answer was not truthful.

Graham Platner. Photo via grahamforsenate.com.

The closing paragraphs of The New York Times’ report on Graham Platner’s sexting-while-married problem are, uh, interesting.

The Democratic Senate candidate from Maine was speaking at an event in April, shortly after Gov. Janet Mills had dropped out, when he was asked a perfectly logical question: Other than the Nazi tattoo and the offensive social-media posts, is there anything else we should know? Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer write:

Toward the end of a town hall meeting in Sabattus, Maine, in April, the night before Ms. Mills dropped out, a Platner supporter named Carolyn Greeley asked him a blunt question.

“Is there anything you need to share with us?” she asked.

Ms. Greeley was bothered by his past comments about women, she said, and wanted assurances that there would not be more damaging revelations to come.

Mr. Platner was unequivocal in his response. Republicans would certainly “make stuff up” about him, he said. He had dated, had girlfriends, “gone through life.” But everything had already been “dragged up,” he promised the crowd.

“In my past, there is not some big, dark secret,” he said.

Asked in an interview how he could be so certain that there was no other information that would come out about him after the event, Mr. Platner was terse.

“I lived my life,” he said. “That’s how.”

We now know not just about the sexting but that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had warned a campaign official about it just as the campaign was getting under way. In other words, Platner failed to tell Greeley the truth, and it’s pretty hard to imagine that he’d forgotten about the sexting.

Meanwhile, Michael Shepherd reports (sub. req.) in the Bangor Daily News that a Platner adviser “warned a former aide she would be accused of lying and sabotage if she cooperated with news outlets reporting on sexually explicit messages Platner sent to women.”

The former aide, an ex-state legislator named Genevieve McDonald, went to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times anyway.

The blood is really in the water now, and you can be sure that news outlets are scrambling to get ahead of whatever might be coming next. And it is absolutely incredible that Maine’s now-she’s-Trumper-now-she-isn’t Republican senator, Susan Collins, may be on the verge of getting another free ride.

With midnight approaching, here are my last three New York Times gift links for October

It’s that most wonderful time of the month, when I’ve got a few gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used and I want to share them with my readers. These links will turn into pumpkins at midnight, which is appropriate on Halloween. (That is, they’d turn into unshareable pumpkins for me. Now that I’ve shared them, you should be able to use them indefinitely.) So please enjoy.

“The Debate Dividing the Supreme Court’s Liberal Justices,” by Jodi Kantor. This is by far the most significant of the three, and it’s absolutely fascinating. Kantor’s major thrust is that Justice Elena Kagan is trying to stick with her longstanding approach of being conciliatory in the hopes of occasionally pulling Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to her side, whereas Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has put the right-wing majority on blast.

Continue reading “With midnight approaching, here are my last three New York Times gift links for October”

Olympia Snowe, a motorcycle rally and me

One of the more fun things I got to do during my years at the Boston Phoenix was drive to Augusta one weekend in 1999 to meet Maine’s senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, at a motorcycle rally. I started thinking about that story following Snowe’s announcement that she won’t seek re-election.

My article, by the way, appeared in the debut issue of the Portland Phoenix, which is still going strong more than a dozen years later. When you visit Portland (one of my favorite cities), you should be sure to pick up a copy.

Snowe’s career harks back to a time when there was such a thing as liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Nonideological partisan politics had its shortcomings, but it did tend to minimize the gridlock and enmity that characterizes the national dialogue today.

Snowe’s announcement will also reduce the ranks of moderate New England Republican senators to just two: Collins and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. And that’s assuming Brown wins re-election this November against his Democratic challenger, Elizabeth Warren.