Less than three weeks to go. What do you mean, “until what?” Do we really have to specify?
The suspense has us thinking back 82 years, when 156,116 men spent hours crammed into open boats, being knocked about by waves, and thinking—or trying not to think—about what was going to happen next. We’re not saying we’d rather be storming the beaches of Normandy, but waiting for the mid-term elections is challenging our equanimity. Fortunately we are dry and safe—and do we ever have distractions.
Here’s one we didn’t see coming: The Man Who Need Not Be Named [TMWNNBN] has finally found someone in his administration whose ethics failed to meet his standards.
The U.S. Ambassador to Greece—who by remarkable coincidence just happens to be one Kimberly Guilfoyle, the President’s own former daughter-in-law-to-be—has been kicked to the curb for soliciting a $100,000 bribe in exchange for access to top administration officials.
Now, since behavior of this sort seems as common as dirt these days; one has to wonder why the Ambassador had to be fired for it. Oh, yes. The headlines.
Reader, spare a moment to consider the tender feelings of the most important person in the world—which he is, without doubt, just ask him. This spasmodic attempt to appear ethical comes at a cost: Mar-a-Lago, the palatial locale at which TMWNNBN grants audience to the wealthiest favor-seekers in the world, has lost one of its most iconic billboards: Ms. Guilfoyle’s improbable face.
It has long been our impression that Northern New England imagines itself as being less prone to these sorts of shenanigans than, say, Boston or D.C. A recent report from ProPublica led us to suspect that maybe we just don’t get out enough.
Released in late September, the bones of the report are this: a PAC supporting Republican Senator Susan Collins asked the CEO of defense contractor Navatek for half a million bucks. The CEO, Martin Kao, did as he was asked—surreptitiously, since such payments are illegal. Lo and behold, contracts were forthcoming to the tune of $32 million in Navy contracts.
Here it helps to remember that Collins is the Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. She often brings up that chairmanship when she’s on the stump. That is why, she tells voters, she can bring home the bacon. The funny thing is she never mentions it also brings all the shady contractors to her yard.
Kao was busted and convicted of making illegal campaign donations. Seeking to get his sentence trimmed, he provided the FBI and federal prosecutors with 50 pages of documentation showing that his donations were part of a much larger quid-pro-quo operation: $900,000 in bribes to land $40 million in contracts.
“Most damningly,” ProPublica reported, “Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy….”
If what Kao said was true, then the donor and donee were both violating the law. The FBI began looking into it. By late 2024, its agents were preparing to launch a wider investigation, including other politicians, while still concentrating on Collins.
Then something happened. You may recall. A certain quadrennial exercise in civic housekeeping. Time to replace a few functionaries. Not to worry—it’s all part of the usual operating system. No cause for alarm, right? We wish.
In comes TMWNNBN 2.0, and Poof! goes the FBI investigation—and for that matter, the FBI. Half the agents are now investigating the other half, who were so careless during the Biden administration as to investigate such matters as a bathroom at Mar-a-Lardo full of stolen Top Secret documents. Director Kash Patel, of course, had better things to do, i.e., spend the taxpayers’ money taking government jets to visit his country-singer girlfriend.
Also AWOL: the Collins/Navatek story itself. Maybe it gets more ink in Maine, but we have to rely on Twitter’s @CollinsWatch, who offered this on Tuesday: “Anyway this story came out 3 weeks ago today. Susan Collins and her team have engaged in lots of hand-waving and false umbrage-taking… but other than a couple weak feints that’ve been debunked they haven’t disputed let alone rebutted any of the article’s key claims.”
It is tempting to savor the possibility that a logger from Maine—not to mention a former busboy from Manchester—will help drag this gang of looters and philistines into the woodshed come January and give them the treatment they so richly deserve.
We remind ourselves, though, that even the best election outcome could be worse, in a way. Imagine a rat; we know you can do it. It may help to imagine he’s in a gilded cage. How will he react if the walls start closing in on him?
Perhaps we flatter ourselves when we deny any ability to see the world through his eyes.
We’re just sure it won’t be pretty.