Graham Platner tackles sexting scandal with familiar strategy: Deny, distract, attack

Graham Platner’s wife Amy Gertner stands by her man in sexting scandal — after his campaign paid her $30K

She's standing by her man -- and getting paid for it.

Graham ” Nazi Tattoo” Platner Drags Out Unhappy Wife as He Finally Breaks His Silence on Massive Sexting Scandal Embroiling His Campaign (VIDEO)

Far-left Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has finally broken his silence about the latest scandal threatening his campaign, and he is using his wife as a shield. The post Graham ” Nazi Tattoo” Platner Drags Out Unhappy Wife as He Finally Breaks His Silence on Massive Sexting Scandal Embroiling His Campaign (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

More shoes to drop for Graham Platner?

Maine Democrats’ deeply-troubled U.S. Senate nominee-in-waiting, Graham Platner, is still considered the favorite in his bid to unseat moderate incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Collins has defied the odds before, as we’ve noted previously, winning comfortably in 2020 even after every single public poll projected she’d lose. But this cycle is proving to be a […]

The Morning Briefing: Graham Platner Is Not an Outlier in the Democratic Party

Graham Platner homes in on Susan Collins’s financial disclosures after weekend playing defense over explicit texts

Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is pointing fingers at incumbent Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-ME) stock assets as he seeks to shift voters’ eyes from another controversy plaguing his campaign this weekend. News broke this weekend that Platner’s wife previously told his former political director she was aware of sexually explicit messages that Platner had […]

The Roberts-Trump feud is a distraction — Supreme Court already handed him the keys: Slate

While the public has been focused on the occasional high-profile clash between President Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, the court's conservative supermajority has been quietly using the shadow docket to hand Trump something far more consequential — effective control of the federal government — and legal analysts say that work is now largely complete.That is the central argument of a new piece by Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, who say the popular narrative of a principled Chief Justice John Roberts standing up to Trump conceals a far more troubling reality."Trump's takeover of the federal government is largely complete," Stern writes. "So I just don't think the court needs to issue nearly as many shadow docket orders as it did during that shock-and-awe campaign — it has already achieved its objectives."The shadow docket refers to emergency orders and procedural rulings the court issues outside its normal merits docket, typically with little explanation and no oral argument. During the first year of Trump's second term, the conservative supermajority used it repeatedly and rapidly to clear the way for Trump to impound federal funds, fire executive officials, and rewrite immigration law — moves that would have been blocked under previous interpretations of the law.Lithwick and Stern argue that Roberts has a long-established pattern of using smaller decisions to prepare the ground for larger ones. "Do something small, get people accustomed to it, then do it big," Stern explains. "The shadow docket has become the way you do that now. You seed the ground on the shadow docket and say: 'Well, this is the law now.' This process used to take four or five years. Now, with the shadow docket, you can do it within the same term."The authors also push back on the idea that occasional Trump losses at the court represent meaningful resistance. The justices, they argue, only draw the line when Trump threatens the court's own power and supremacy — not when he threatens civil liberties, voting rights, or the separation of powers more broadly.That selective resistance, Lithwick warns, may ultimately backfire. The court has repeatedly rewarded Trump for defying lower court orders. "There is no clear reason why that should stop with the Supreme Court," she writes. "Eventually, the administration won't just say: It worked all these other times, it should work this time."If that happens, Stern argues, the court will have squandered whatever moral authority it had left. "They've made me a king," he writes of Trump's likely reasoning, "so I'm going to act like one."

Transcript: Trump Epstein Scandal Takes Damning Turn as MAGA Cracks Up

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 1 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.On Friday, former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified to lawmakers behind closed doors about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. What Democrats said afterwards strongly suggests that this mess is not going away for Donald Trump and very likely will get worse next year if Democrats take back the House. This comes amid other signs that the Republican lines of defense around Trump are crumbling on many fronts. And Trump himself may be to blame, because it’s his mounting unpopularity that’s driving it all. As one Republican put it, Trump is lame-ducking himself.We’re talking about all this with historian Nicole Hemmer, who’s one of our go-to people on Epstein and the right wing, a topic she’s written several books about. Nicole, always nice to have you on.Nicole Hemmer: Lovely to be back, Greg.Sargent: So Pam Bondi, the former AG, was on Capitol Hill as part of the House’s ongoing investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein files, which are the investigative materials gathered as part of DOJ’s probe of Epstein’s sex trafficking. One of the big things that happened in her testimony was that she essentially threw acting AG Todd Blanche under the bus. Listen to Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, recounting what Bondi said.Robert Garcia (voiceover): In that interview and what she’s saying here, in her words and remarks, is that it was Todd Blanche, the current acting AG, that was leading the Epstein investigation. And quite frankly, all of the mistakes that we saw—the redactions, not protecting survivors—she continues to push that back onto the acting AG Todd Blanche, who, by the way, was Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer.Sargent: So Bondi apparently blamed Blanche for just about everything that’s gone wrong—the lack of transparency, all of it. Nicole, what do you make of that?Hemmer: It’s an interesting move. Pam Bondi is in such a different position at this point than she was when she was first subpoenaed to give this testimony. She used to be the attorney general. Now she’s been forced out and she is shifting all the blame onto her presumed successor. Blanche is going to have to go through confirmation hearings soon, and she has just made that very difficult for him. Epstein is going to be the focus of conversation when Blanche goes up for confirmation.What’s interesting about it, and kind of surprising about it, is that Pam Bondi only has herself to blame for being the face of the Epstein scandal within the Trump administration. She is the one who said that she had the files on her desk. She called in all of those right-wing influencers to come parade around with their binders. And so it’s a little too little too late, but I think that it plays into her hand—and into Democrats’ hands—for her to push the blame on Blanche, who’s not only going up to be attorney general but also is Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. And so she’s making his life difficult, probably because she was forced out of her position.Sargent: Well, yes. And I think we should remind everybody, just sort of related to what you just said there, that MAGA for many, many years really wanted to know what was in the Epstein files. It was a huge obsession on the far right. It was a huge obsession among all these influencers, to the degree that she actually brought them in to say, hey, we’re going to really blow this thing open for you guys. You put us in charge and now we’re going to make it all right. And then of course, as soon as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the FBI director, got a look at what was in the Epstein files, they were just like, no, we’re not doing that anymore. Can you just sort of talk about that big history in context?Hemmer: Well, that history is really important because so many of the people who were put in place in this second Trump administration were put in place not only because they were Trump loyalists, but because they had a lot of support from the MAGA base that they built on this idea that the Epstein files needed to be released. This is huge for Kash Patel, for Dan Bongino, both in the FBI, and for Pam Bondi. And so I think Bondi thought early on that she could score a lot of points with the Trump base by pushing the Epstein story to the very front of her time as attorney general. This was going to be the thing that she was going to make her name on because it was so important to the base.And she immediately put herself between a rock and a hard place because the base really cares about these Epstein files. They really care about this scandal. And Donald Trump doesn’t want anyone talking about it. And so Bondi saw herself suddenly serving two masters—the MAGA base and Donald Trump—and there was no way to satisfy both of them.

What Other Skeletons Are Lurking in Graham Platner’s Closet?

Sexting revelations are the latest in a long line of troublesome details about the Senate candidate’s past.