Steve Robinson

Mainwire Mondays, as usual. And we appreciate Steve Robinson being back in the house. It's been a while, sir. How are things? Fantastic and underslept. Yeah, I bet. I bet. I know what that's like. You've been to it five, five, six, seven times now. I forgot. Yeah, but you know what, Steve? It's always the worst on the first. It always is. So you're living through it right now, which I love. So Steve, I think this is the perfect time for you to come back and join us once again because your old friend Troy Jackson is back in the news. He is apparently, they tell me, the Senate nominee replacing Graham Platner. For the Democrats taking on Susan Collins this year, the convention to rubber stamp that just took place over the weekend. And that was a fun time, wasn't it? You did God's work in actually watching that convention. What did you see Steve Robinson at the convention? Well, I mean, first of all, they denied our press credentials getting into this thing, which I took personally offense to, but I learned that it wasn't just the main wire that they denied press credentials to. There's a whole swath of media outlets, small, medium, large, basically any media outlet except for like the main morning star. Apparently, you had to show... your check stubs from George Soros in order to be allowed to attend this thing. So even though it was a preordained event, it was carefully coordinated. Everybody knew who was going to win. It was a coronation, really a waste of party funds, if you ask me. They were very careful about who they allowed in there to film events, to interview attendees. No surprises, except for maybe the virtue signaling and kind of the, you know, the pablum that you would expect. Troy Jackson, for people who have followed his career, has not been your archetypical liberal in terms of, you know, pink hair, embracing the transgender nonsense, you know, the DEI stuff. really more of a conservative guy. So it's kind of an odd fit to see the convention nominating him come with pronoun disclosures and land acknowledgments and, you know, all of the, I guess, genuflecting towards the modern liberal totems. Yeah. I know. And I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I know there was one particular moment at the convention, which I found interesting, related to the land specifically. You talked about land acknowledgments, but whether or not ceded land or unseated land, you know, Charles Dingman.

Yeah, so Charles Dingman, who, you know, really made his public debut this year. He's been the chairman of the Democratic Party for a while, but he's actually fun fact. He's a lawyer who defends organizations that have been accused of Medicaid fraud. So if you're accused of Medicaid fraud like, you know, Gateway Community Services or Happy House in Lewiston, you hire Charles Dingman and all of a sudden your Medicaid fraud claim goes away. It's magic. Who could imagine something like that happening? He's the chairman of the main Democratic Party, and he opens up his speech saying, you know, first we need to acknowledge that we're on unseated Wabnaki land, which, one, is just stupid liberal vomit, but two, is not true. It's not, it's just factually incorrect. And there's no room for interpretation on that, like that, legally speaking, there is nothing that lets you claim that. In 1980, the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act, for once and for all, put this to bed. The tribal elders agreed to a deal that gave them $84 million in cash and territory and extinguish all of their claims. There is no seeded land. And you can argue that it was a bad deal. You can argue that there were dirty tricks pulled behind the scenes. You can argue that there was a deep state conspiracy. against the Passamaquoddy or one tribe got the better of it than the others. There's all kinds of arguments you can make about it, and they have made them around the native sovereignty bill that has been pushed in recent legislative sessions. You can make those claims, sure, but you cannot say that it's unseeded land because it was in fact seated. So it's just totally false for him to go out there and say, we are on unseeded land. Yeah, but it is the ultimate virtue signal, isn't it? I didn't want to get too distracted by that, mostly because there's a lot about Troy Jackson to talk about. One of the interesting things about this guy is they have replaced sort of the consummate outsider, like the guy who's never run for anything before, who's never been elected to anything, who's 40 years old, nobody really ever heard of until about three minutes ago. with a guy who's been around Maine politics for the better part of three decades, really. And so he has a long record, and there's a lot we know about Troy Jackson, and you've been doing a lot of digging over the course of many years related to Troy Jackson. Tell me the story of what you know about this guy. I know that I've already seen some Susan Collins ads that have brought up some scandals and some problems in his background. There's the famous water bottle throwing incident. There's the... the tax issues, there's the claims of where he actually lives, all this stuff. There's a lot of there there, Steve. So tell me a little bit about Troy Jackson. Well, fortunately, Maine Wire readers got to see everything that's going to appear in a Susan Collins attack at about two or three years ago. Troy Jackson has been in Maine politics long enough to be on both sides of every single issue. He starts out as the country bumpkin lawmaker from O'Rustick County. He's a conservative Republican, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-worker.

And he ends his career having shepherded through a late-term abortion bill, stringent gun control legislation, and some of the biggest tax and spend budgets that we've ever seen, you know, multiple, multiple tax increases. So his transformation really has been remarkable. And I think that floating out there in the ether, you're probably going to find some of the main right to life scorecards. the Sportsman's Alliance, scorecards, some of these surveys that he's filled out over the years. And if you make a nice little line chart, you'll be able to document his transformation. But my theory of the guiding principle here is whatever's best for Troy, is how he transitions from issue to issue. And there's no better example of that than his 2004 flip-flop on gun control issues. In 2023, He voted against three gun control proposals, extended waiting periods, expanded background checks, and I think a red flag law. There are three very big proposals that the gun control lobby was pushing. Then in December of 2023, there's a group called Resurgum Group. This is a lobbying organization started by his former chief of staff, BJ McAllister. who also happens to have as a partner, Chase Jackson, Troy Jackson's son. The Resurgum Group gets a $50,000 retainer from the main gun safety coalition. And less than a month later, Troy Jackson, father of a partner to the Resurgum Group, is in front of an activist group in the Bangor area saying, I've had a change of heart. I'm going to vote differently on these three gun control bills. And wouldn't you know it that Troy Jackson, the protector of gun rights, the Democrat who is very, very pro gun because it's part of his culture and he's a manor dammit, all of a sudden he flips on gun control and it just so happens to happen after $50,000 flows into his son's company. No connection, I'm sure. No connection, I'm sure. But that's an example of Troy Jackson, his politics follows the money. And I think that you're going to see that specific example hammered over and over again by Senator Susan Collins in television debates because the Second Amendment is a really big deal in Maine. I don't know if you've noticed this. I've heard that. In the second congressional district especially. So there's a narrative here where Troy Jackson has... chased the DSA vote and DSA popularity and the socialists in Portland and abandoned his hometown roots at the very same time, by the way, that he moved out of Aristich County, left his Aligash home and pursued residency in Augusta. Yeah. Actually, I want to ask you about that specifically, too, because if people at home who are listening to this don't know. If you're a state lawmaker, either in the House or the Senate, you're supposed to basically make nothing, absolutely zero dollars, really. They give you just enough to basically buy food and gas, really. It's intended to be a citizen legislature. But Troy Jackson has found a way of earning a very handsome salary, and part of that is tied to, hey, by the way, where does this guy live and how much travel is he doing and everything else, which gets into this residency question and that house that he bought, which he is now sold, obviously, and where he really lives.

Because it's a pretty fishy story. Like, I mean, there's possible federal laws he's broken here. Tell me more. So in 2019, Troy Jackson purchased a home in Augusta. He did this using an FHA mortgage. It's a mortgage that's reserved for people who are low-income, first-time home buyers. And in exchange for meeting certain guidelines and making certain promises, you get a lower interest rate. So Jackson went for the FHA loan, got the low interest rate, and when he signed the loan, he agreed to an occupancy clause, which said that he was going to make this home his primary residence for at least a year. Now this home is in Augusta. It's 240 miles drive away from his home in Alagash. This means that he was simultaneously promising to the main ethics commission, I live in Alagash for the purposes of his campaign. But for the purposes of getting that low interest rate, he was saying his primary residence is in Augusta. Both of those things can't be true. He either committed mortgage fraud by lying to the bank about where his primary residence would be, or he committed perjury or campaign finance fraud or lied to the main ethics commission when he told them that he was a resident of Alagash. When we reported on this and it all surfaced, his defense was that he didn't read his mortgage. Literally, that's what he said. He said, this is unfortunate, but I didn't read it. I just trusted my mortgage broker. Which we all know absolves you of any legal responsibility when you don't read. Correct. Correct. You know, if that's the case, I'm never reading any of any legal agreement ever again in the future, if that absolves you from anything, which, of course, it doesn't. But the entire story, once we broke it, prompted an ethics complaint against Jackson. And he effectively went into the ethics hearing and swore over and over and over again that he was always a resident of Alagash, that he was never a resident of Augusta. And what that did was allowed him to keep his seat in Augusta and remain Senate president, but it also created this. factual documentary record of him saying over and over again, I violated that occupancy clause. I violated that mortgage agreement. So the ethics commission doesn't have any jurisdiction to rule over mortgage fraud or financial crimes, but the U.S. attorney does. And for several years, the U.S. attorney was Darcy McAway, a Biden appointee who went on to get a judge ship from Janet Mills. You can see not a lot of enthusiasm there to indict Troy Jackson for mortgage fraud. But now there's a U.S. attorney who was picked by President Trump. So maybe there is a bigger appetite to poke around FHA mortgage fraud. But I can tell you that this isn't some, you know, piddling crime. Darcy McA. McAway indicted a guy named Merton Weed Jr. of Norway for FHA fraud. So if you're little Morton-Weed junior living out in Norway, not the Senate president, you can be indicted for mortgage fraud if you lie on a mortgage application, including FHA fraud. But if you're Troy Jackson, president of the Senate, you know, big swing and dick politician, you can't be indicted. Apparently is the rule set that we're operating under. But that's just...

That's just one of the many issues with Troy Jackson and how he's handled his business, Jackson, the family business. And you know what? I would be remiss not to note that at the end of last year, Troy had a lien filed against him for unpaid state income taxes. And can you guess what address that lien went to? It did not go to his Alligash address. It went to his address in Augusta because even though he sold the house in Augusta, he very quickly got a condo very near to the State House. So this is a guy who has lived in Augusta for years, which makes sense. It's convenient for a guy whose entire business revolves around where the taxpayer money is. But he's pretended to live in Alagash so much so that when he was Senate president. He claimed more money and reimbursements than any lawmaker in the history of the legislature. He claimed reimbursements as if he was regularly making the drive from Augusta to Alagash and back. That's like 600 miles round trip. During the COVID years, he made over $160,000 in reimbursements. on meals, travel, and lodging, as if he was making that drive. And the entire time, he either owned or rented a place right in Augusta. So the listeners can be the judge of whether he was actually making those drives or whether he was filing some paperwork to get a little extra cheddar on the side. And by the way, the only person who had to approve his reimbursement submissions was Troy Jackson. Jackson, Inc. sounds like a good documentary that the mainwire will be producing in moments. Thanks a lot, Steve, as always, appreciate it. And thanks for coming back. Good talking to you, as always. See soon.