Is Susan Collins going to survive the midterms? I don’t know, but things are looking messy for her.
Earlier this year, Trump’s policies were undercutting Collins at every turn. Last July,, when Joan Sebastian Guerrero was shot and killed by ICE in Maine, and protesters swarmed Collins’s local office, she negotiated a deal with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to halt ICE-initiated traffic stops. Okay, that might have helped. But then the next day Trump insisted that the traffic stops continue.
Trump’s feud with Canada can’t be helping her much, either. And then Trump nominated an anti-abortion physician, Heidi Overton, to be FDA Commissioner. Collins sits on the Committee that’s supposed to vote on whether to advance the nomination. Much of Collins’s appeal in Maine is said to be based on her allegedly staunch support of abortion rights, although she screwed up big time when she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. And she screwed up again by declaring she doesn’t regret the vote.
But now she’s in bigger trouble, because she’s been accused of engaging in pay-for-play, and the evidence is pretty damning. The basic story, which was first reported in ProPublica, centered on Martin Kao, the former CEO of the defense contracting firm Navatek, A political adviser and fundraiser for Collins solicited donations for a Collins Super PAC by promising defense contracts for Navatek.Kao used shell corporations to make the donations to bypass laws prohibiting defense contractors from directly donating to candidates. And it turns out that whatever it was that Kao produced for the military was useless. Kao is currently serving an 87-month prison sentence for bank fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and COVID-19 relief fraud,
Collins maintains that the FBI exonerated her during the Biden Administration. But it appears the investigation was still ongoing when Trump got back into office, and that the investigation was effectively shut down by Trump’s purge of the FBI. And ProPublica has all kinds of documentation and receipts.
The Collins campaign is still trying to do damage control. This is from yesterday in The New Repubic:
Steve Abbott, who is managing Collins’s reelection campaign, claimed at a press conference Wednesday that Navatek’s research in 2019 benefited the University of Maine, who used it to launch a new boat last month. He even held up pictures of the boat at the press conference. Unfortunately for him and Collins, the University of Maine debunked his claim.
“This most recent boat has no Navatek connection, and UMaine has not worked with Navatek since 2021,” the University of Maine’s Samantha Warren said.
The latest polls have Collins holding a narrow lead over challenger Troy Jackson, but the pay for play scandal probably isn’t reflected in them. But Collins is an institution in Maine. She was first elected to the Senate 20 years ago. I have no sense of how public opinion is developing in Maine. If any of you do, please comment.
In other news — Remember just a few days ago when Trump promised the Iran War would end right after the miderms, and oil prices would fall and everybody would get a pony? Now there are reports Trump is planning to resume attacks on Iran after the midterms. And I so wanted that pony.
