Gov. Paul LePage said Thursday that he supports the appointment of a special counsel to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Speaking on WGAN radio, LePage said a special counselor – or “prosecutor,” in his words – should look into the issue. On Wednesday, the Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to lead the investigation into possible contact between President Trump’s associates and the Kremlin.
At the same time, LePage repeatedly bashed the media and “the left” and implied that Trump is being treateed unfairly.
“I don’t trust the media, so my feeling is, let’s have a prosecutor,” LePage said. “I agree with that. Let’s get to the facts. Get the facts on the table and let’s see what happened.”
LePage also compared his own embattled relationship with the media to that of Trump, who told U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduates on Wednesday that “no politician in history … has been treated worse or more unfairly.” Like Trump, LePage is often criticized for making inaccurate or inflammatory statements in public.
The governor also claimed his opponents tried to impeach him twice. Although there have been several campaigns to build support to impeach LePage, the Maine House has voted only once on whether to proceed with an investigation that could have led to impeachment over LePage’s intervention in former House Speaker Mark Eves’ hiring by a nonprofit. The Democratic-controlled House voted not to pursue impeachment.
“To be impeached … you have to have committed something. You have to have done something, high crimes or misdemeanor,” LePage said. “I did neither and they still tried to impeach me. So listen, the left will do anything. There is not a thing they won’t do.”
LePage added, however, that he is “very suspect of a lot of things that have happened in our country, including Vince Foster,” a reference to ongoing conspiracy theories that Foster, a deputy counsel in the Clinton White House, did not commit suicide but was murdered. “I don’t know by who, but I don’t believe … they said it was a suicide,” LePage said.
During the wide-ranging conversation with WGAN hosts Matt Gagnon and Ken Altshuler, LePage also said he believes the high-risk health insurance pools adopted by Maine early in his administration were a good national model. High-risk pools are part of the Obamacare replacement plans now being developed by Republicans in Congress.
He also accused Lucas St. Clair, the chief advocate for Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, of leaving his office out of conversations and events leading up to the monument’s creation last year. The monument is now part of a Trump administration review to determine if there was adequate public input before the designation .
“Lucas St. Clair said I have been invited by, that they had contacted my office numerous times,” LePage said. “So we have been looking through everybody’s files, and we were left completely out.”
Both LePage and St. Clair, who is the son of conservationist and land donor Roxanne Quimby, testified during a congressional subcommittee hearing earlier this month on presidential authority to create national monuments. At the time, St. Clair told the congressional panel that his family’s nonprofit, Elliotsville Plantation Inc., had reached out to LePage’s office numerous times and that he met with the governor’s former senior counsel “a number of times.”
St. Clair also has said there were numorous public forums and discussions that the LePage administration did not participate in.
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