
Graham Platner trots out wife to deal with his extramarital sexting scandal, giving some Democrats the ick
Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee hoping to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, has in recent months polled relatively well and enjoyed the support of fellow travelers in D.C. despite a series of scandals — including one scandal that prompted multiple members of his campaign to jump ship.Platner has managed, for instance, to maintain the support of Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton (Mass.), Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and Sen. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), even after it was revealed he previously identified as a communist, branded rural white Americans as racists, suggested that service members worried about being raped should buy "Kevlar underwear," smeared all police officers as "bastards," mocked Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and adorned himself with an apparent "totenkopf" tattoo reminiscent of the skull image popularized by Adolf Hitler's Schutzstaffel elite guard.'He is an issue.'While Platner's campaign has always been plagued by controversy, it appears to finally have become too much for some Democrats to bear — especially after it was revealed that the married candidate sent at least six women sexually explicit texts.Amy Gertner — Platner's wife since 2023 — discovered the trove of debauched extramarital texts, then brought them to the attention of her husband's Senate campaign during the vetting process last year, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times."The United States Senate is not a training ground for redemption," Genevieve McDonald, the former Democratic state representative who resigned as political director of Platner's campaign in October, told the Times. "It is a place for proven leaders with moral clarity and integrity."McDonald claimed that Platner sent sexually graphic texts to as many as a dozen women.After current and former campaign officials confirmed the exchanges to the Times, Platner's campaign confirmed to Politico that the candidate had indeed sent the texts.RELATED: Squad-endorsed candidate once reportedly volunteered with group tied to al-Qaeda and testified for terrorist 'blind cleric' Graeme Sloan/Getty ImagesMorris Katz — a strategist for Platner's campaign who wrote that he wanted to use images of his penis in a 2020 children's book — said of the reports about his boss' wandering eye, "It's no one's f**king business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office."Gertner — who receives money from the campaign for serving as its volunteer coordinator — tried on Saturday to turn her husband's scandal on the media, noting in a video statement shared online by Platner, "It makes me really angry, disappointed, and I find it really shameful that there's a group of media outlets and people who are willing to spread gossip instead of talking about real issues that Graham is running on."After insinuating that questions about Platner's trustworthiness and fidelity aren't relevant to the race, Gertner said that she and her husband went to marriage counseling and that she doesn't "want a perfect marriage."Like Gertner, Rep. Ro Khanna reaffirmed his support for Platner, stating on Saturday that he was proud of Collins' challenger "for having a vision for a new deal for our time."Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), however, adopted a different tone, telling ABC News when asked on Sunday whether Platner might be jeopardizing Senate control for the Democrats, "Yes, I have concerns. That guy has questions to answer."Levar Stoney, the former Democratic mayor of Richmond, Virginia, similarly knocked Platner, writing, "I can’t help but think that if this candidate were a person of color or a woman, my party would be asking them to consider stepping aside immediately. A Nazi tattoo! Now this. I want Democrats to take back the Senate — but not like this."Prior to the revelations about Platner's sexting exploits, some Democrats were already airing their concerns about his candidacy."I think when we're talking about moral clarity and what we want to see from Democrats, I think he is an issue," former Biden press office chief of staff Yemisi Egbewole, told Fox News' Bill Melugin last week.Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) also denounced Platner last week, telling CNN, "I've been clear about Graham Platner. I find that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying.""I hope Maine voters agree with me," continued Auchincloss. "I think it would be a mistake for the Democratic Party to think that Graham Platner's brand of the Democratic Party is what wins us durable majorities throughout this country."Over the weekend, the Maine Wire reported that Platner appeared to have an account on the messaging application Kik — long a cesspool for perverts and child exploitation — with the username "phustle0331."CNN later confirmed that the account, which features a photo of a partially naked individual with tattoos identical to those sported by the Democratic candidate, belongs to...
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Soviet-style assault on the First Amendment, the radical California State Assembly has officially voted to criminalize investigative journalism. The post California Assembly Passes “Stop Nick Shirley Act” – Radical Democrats Move to Criminalize Investigative Journalism and Shield Massive Immigrant Services Fraud appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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 […]
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.
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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.
Just what do lefties like Graham Platner have to do to get Democrats to condemn them?
There’s virtually nothing a left-wing candidate could say or do that would elicit condemnation from Democrats if doing so threatened their power.







