Controversial candidate outrages longtime GOP senator in 'corruption crackdown' proposal
Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner on Thursday unveiled a sweeping anti-corruption agenda featuring a plank named after incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, accusing the Maine Republican of using the power of public office to direct money to her husband’s firm and enrich herself.
Platner’s proposed “Collins Rule” would require senators to “recuse themselves from any vote, decision, or oversight activity involving an agency from which their spouse’s firm receives government contracts.” Underlying the proposal is the Platner campaign’s allegation that Collins “funneled more than $76 million in federal contracts to her husband’s lobbying firm”—a claim that Collins’ campaign denounced as “a lie.”
In a social media post on Thursday after Platner announced his proposed “Corruption Crackdown,” Collins wrote that “a man I have never met held a press conference and accused me of criminal conduct,” referencing the Platner campaign’s claim about the federal contract dollars flowing to her husband’s firm.
“That is outrageous and false,” Collins added.
Platner responded with a social media post of his own. “I didn’t say what Susan Collins did is criminal,” he wrote. “I said it SHOULD be criminal.”
In a nine-page document outlining its anti-corruption agenda, Platner’s campaign writes that “no existing law” prevents the spouse of a US senator from “being enriched through winning contracts from agencies the senator oversees.”
“Hiring your spouse is banned. Arranging for your spouse’s firm to receive millions from agencies you oversee is, apparently, fine,” the document states. “This is plain corruption, and we will not stand for it.”
“We’re taking this fight directly to Susan Collins and her billionaire donors, and we won’t stop until power is returned to the working people of Maine.”
Collins’ campaign manager rejected Platner’s characterization of the senator’s record and said she “has not funneled any money to Tom Daffron,” her husband.
Daffron, who married Collins in 2012, was a registered lobbyist in 2006-2007 and, for the subsequent decade, served as chief operating officer for Jefferson Consulting Group, the firm that Platner’s campaign says benefited from Collins’ votes to the tune of $76 million.
News Center Maine noted that, “in its accounting, Platner’s campaign pointed to a list, compiled by searching the USA Spending website, of contracts awarded to Jefferson Consulting by the US Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, State, Interior, and Veterans Affairs. Fifty-five million dollars came from two contracts with USAID, the Agency for International Development, roughly three-quarters of that $76 million.”
“The Collins campaign did not dispute the total amount in contracts,” News Center Maine added, “but said it was the Obama administration, not Congress, that was responsible for doling out those funds between 2009 and 2016.” (The executive branch awards federal contracts that are funded through congressional appropriations.)
During a press conference on Thursday, Platner rejected the notion that Collins’ support for appropriations that ultimately benefited the firm that employed her husband was innocuous because she wasn’t responsible for awarding the contracts.
“My entire life, I have heard from the political system that all of these very obvious mechanisms of corruption aren’t actually corruption,” he said. “That when we see people appropriating funds, when we see procurement systems in place, that the money comes from appropriations from the Senate and from the House, that somehow these things are entirely divorced, and it’s just sheer coincidence that people who are connected to those in power wind up receiving lots of extra money.”
“Obviously that’s false,” Platner added. “Any normal person can see that if you are directly tied to the power of the United States senator and you yourself benefit from it, and that senator’s household benefits from it, that there’s obviously some form of connection there.”
In addition to the “Collins Rule,” Platner’s anti-corruption agenda calls for barring members of Congress and their spouses from trading stocks, “under penalty of imprisonment.”
“As long as sitting members of Congress are allowed to hold and trade stock connected to the industries they have a hand in regulating, the public will keep asking whether their policy decisions serve our best interest—or their own bank accounts,” the agenda reads.
Collins has opposed bipartisan legislation that would ban congressional stock trading, arguing for better enforcement of existing laws such as the STOCK Act—which the Maine Republican has violated dozens of times by missing the 45-day deadline to report her husband’s trades.
NOTUS reported earlier this year that Daffron “purchased a Pfizer corporate bond worth from $15,001 to $50,000 on February 3, but Collins didn’t disclose the purchase to the Senate” until late March. Collins, whose net worth skyrocketed following her marriage to Daffron, says she has never owned or traded individual stocks during her three-decade Senate career.
Platner’s agenda calls for “dramatically” increasing penalties for STOCK Act violations, which typically amount to a minuscule $200 fine. The Democratic candidate argues that “criminal prosecution—including imprisonment—[must be] on the table for the worst offenses, not a $200 parking ticket.”
The Platner campaign’s “Corruption Crackdown” also calls for overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, shuttering the revolving door between Washington and corporate America by permanently banning former lawmakers from lobbying Congress, prohibiting candidates for federal office from receiving corporate PAC money, and requiring the Pentagon to pass an audit before it receives any additional funding.
“The establishment has rigged the system with legalized corruption and poisoned our elections with billionaire money and a politics that enriches the powerful at the expense of working people,” Platner said Thursday. “We’re taking this fight directly to Susan Collins and her billionaire donors, and we won’t stop until power is returned to the working people of Maine.”
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