No one was more delighted than me to watch the President publicly dress down Janet P. Mills, the Dem governor of Maine, in front of her colleagues.
Mills decided to mouth off at Trump at a National Governor’s Association todo being held at the White House after the President mentioned that Maine was defying his Executive Order on transexuals in girl’s sports. She was attempting to virtue posture by way of the “Maine obeys the law” schtick when Trump reminded her that he had set the law and that he could easily cut off all of Maine’s federal funding. This pretty much hushed her down.
I had a weird encounter with Mills years ago when I lived for a brief period in Maine. She appeared at the house where I was living dressed in odd pioneer housewife garb -- a print dress reaching to the ground and a man’s blazer. She was looking for a particular “Republican” and thought I might know where he was. Mills never once looked directly at me, but instead over my shoulder. She spoke in a monotone. Her expression was one I’ve noticed on a number of female pols such as Hillary, Liz Cheney, and Amy Klobuchar, a kind of blank, stone-faced look that masks any and all emotion.
I began getting a very weird vibe over this. It was as if I was confronting not a human being but some kind of human-sized insect that was trying to infiltrate the human race and doing a lousy job of it.
Eventually she scuttled off, leaving me to reflect on whether I’ve ever had a normal encounter with a politician. In the years since, I’ve kept an eye on her career both as Maine state AG and governor. There have been some interesting episodes.
In 2016, Mills refused to reopen the case of Dennis Dechaine, convicted of murdering a child, despite credible evidence (including DNA evidence) that Dechaine was innocent. Instead, evidence held by the AG’s office – including the rape kit – was destroyed. No one in the AG’s office was punished or otherwise held responsible.
(This isn’t the only time that Mills has had a problem with rape kits. As governor, she vetoed a rape kit tracking and inventory bill intended to rationalize the state’s incoherent current system. Mills’ explanation for this was the standard irrelevant Democrat boilerplate about how concerned she is about sex assault victims.)
In 2018, Mills was rebuked in court after trying to seize, without judicial approval, film footage from the Kennebec Journal concerning a murder involving a “girl” (yep, one of those) accused of murdering her parents. So much for the 4th Amendment.
In 2019, Anthony Sanborn, Jr. was released after 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. All efforts on his part to have the sentence officially vacated were stonewalled by Mills, apparently in an effort to protect the office’s reputation.
The worst by far was the Justin DiPietro case, in which a toddler, Ayla Reynolds, vanished while under her father’s care. DiPietro claimed she had been abducted, but investigators found massive amounts of the child’s blood in the basement and concluded she could not have survived. Police forwarded the evidence to the AG’s office, but Mills, for reasons still unknown, refused to act on it, essentially shelving it even in the face of national uproar over the case.
A relative? Or a relative of a donor, more to the point? Who knows? While DiPietro insists on his innocence, a settlement was granted to the child’s mother and her family. The details are sealed.
(This kind of thing is not unknown among state governors. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro is enmeshed in an almost identical case, in which his AG office for four years sat on the murder of young woman named Ellen Greenberg, insisting against all evidence that it was a “suicide.” The Dems have been talking about running Shapiro for president in ’28. Sure – go for it.)
Legal hijinks are not unknown to the Mills family. The governor’s father S. Peter Mills, Jr. was assigned by the Eisenhower administration to prosecute psychologist Wilhelm Reich, who after a distinguished career had gone mildly dotty and became obsessed with researching a nonexistent force called “orgone energy.” Reich had been selling “orgone accumulators” and the medical establishment wanted it stopped. Good old Ike acquiesced in exchange for an endorsement. Reich was duly convicted and died in his prison cell in 1957. His codefendant Michael Silvert killed himself. In later years, Mills was known to tell acquaintances in Franklin County that Reich had been guilty of nothing. But Mills had his orders.
Why are they like this? I don’t know. But they are, and it would best for us if we didn’t forget it.
Image: AT via Magic Studio