In Friday’s Portland Press Herald, I had a follow up on how Maine’s two US Senators — both of whom sit on the committee leading the key probe into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — were reacting to President Trump’s shifting explanation for why he fired FBI Director James Comey. On television, Trump said he planned to fire the director regardless of what the Justice Department thought, and made remarks that suggested the FBI investigation of Trump and Russia that Comey was overseeing had something to do with it.
The senators had very different stances.
When asked, Senator Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, promptly sent a statement expressing concern and alarm over the president’s “bizarre” statements. Republican Senator Susan Collins — whose initial statement on the Comey firing accepted and defended the President’s original, now discarded explanation — declined to comment, even though the senator’s language has shifted and toughened in more recent public statements on the firing.
More in the story.
[Update, 5/18/17: Here’s what Collins had to say about the revelation that Comey wrote memos describing Trump asking him to stop part of his Russia probe from today’s Press Herald.]
For more coverage on the Russia-Trump investigation and Maine’s senators, click the Russia label here at World Wide Woodard.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.