Exposing the Billionaire Plot to Swamp Maine with Racist Propaganda

Two billionaires fund a racist, right-wing media juggernaut in Maine

Maine Wire staff pose with a blown-up photo of a 16-year old Somali-Mainer from Lewiston that the outlet turned into a mascot for “Somali fraud” at a recent Maine Republican gubernatorial debate in Bangor. For more on the backstory and why the boy is afraid to leave his family’s apartment because of this stunt, check out Steve Collins’ column “Frightened Lewiston Somalis feel besieged by The Maine Wire”

I was excited to be able to work with journalist Noah Hurowitz on a new investigation into the Maine Wire, its billionaire funders and its racist terror campaign against the Somali community in Maine. The story – “GOP Megadonor Leonard Leo is Bankrolling a Website on the Warpath Against Somalis” — exposes the funders that have transformed a small partisan blog into a juggernaut in the Maine media scene. The Maine Wire boasts 200,000 followers across Facebook and X, as well as 26,000 subscribers to its spinoff on Substack in a state with a population of just 1.4 million.

I knew part-time Mainer Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society ghoul who brought us the current make-up of the Supreme Court, heavily funded the Maine Wire, but I didn’t realize the extent that he bankrolls this right-wing slop factory. As Hurowitz writes, $1.2 million of Maine Policy Institute’s $1.9 million budget came from organizations connected to Leo’s dark money network. The Maine Wire is the media arm of MPI.

In addition, billionaire MAGA donor Tom Klingstein, a part-time Maine resident and Chairman of the pro-Trump Claremont Institute, is also a major funder of the Maine Wire. As I wrote in my December article “The Maine Liar: Maine’s Merchant of Hate Steve Robinson,” Klingenstein and Big Steve go back to Robinson’s days at Bowdoin College. Klingenstein enlisted Robinson to help him take revenge on Bowdoin’s president for having the nerve to accuse the billionaire of violating golf etiquette.

From the Intercept article:

An analysis by The Intercept of tax documents detailing donations to the organization showed that funds controlled by or linked to Klingenstein and Leo donated at least $2.6 million to the Maine Policy Institute between 2020 and 2024, while a handful of other donor-advised funds — a common vehicle for anonymous donations — provided at least another $390,965 during that period.

In 2021, the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund contributed $249,000, and overall contributions leapt from $693,536 to $1.07 million. Funding surged yet again two years later, to $1.7 million in 2023, including another $200,000 from Klingenstein’s foundation and a gift of $760,100 from a donor-advised fund that had previously received tens of millions of dollars from a nonprofit linked to Leo.

In 2024, the most recent year for which tax documents are available, the Maine Policy Institute had $1.9 million in total revenue — including $760,000 from the 85 Fund, a Leo-linked nonprofit, and $450,000 from DonorsTrust, a conduit for dark money that has is heavily funded by Leo’s network.

So whenever you see friends and family share Maine Wire content, remind them that this massive propaganda campaign is funded by two billionaire summer people deadset on pitting Mainers against Mainers to distract us from the fact that these greedy pigs are robbing us blind by rigging the economy to their personal benefit. Graham Platner summed it up pretty well in the article:

“This is a very clear example of what happens when too much wealth gets consolidated in our political system,” he told The Intercept. “In a state like Maine, which is not a wealthy state, and there are not a lot of resources around, they can come in and utilize their money as power to drive specific media narratives and to incentivize certain kinds of stories.”

In the meantime, the Maine Wire is working hand in glove with the Trump administration to use racism and xenophobia to dismantle programs for the most vulnerable amongst us. I have interviewed a number of African immigrants who run care providers that make up the backbone of the care economy in Southern Maine. They tell me the Trump administration has already successfully pressured the state to cut funding to some providers using trumped up fraud claims, leaving patients without anyone to care for them. There will be more news stories in the future about the human impact of this racist campaign. We also shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that our African immigrant neighbors are really suffering due to this billionaire-funded political persecution campaign.

“They are spewing hate and demonizing an entire population as un-American, as scammers, and the right is just eating that up,” one Somali American community organizer, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of further targeting by the site and its readers, told the Intercept. “The fascist regime we’re under right now, that is one of their tactics — to change the conversation and the public opinion of certain groups in order to destroy democracy.”