The Maine Governor’s cocaine problem

On a trip to the nation’s capital last week, 77-year-old Governor Janet Mills of Maine was confronted with an old skeleton in her closet: accusations of cocaine use.

A man approached Mills and, while filming, asked if she believed “sniffing cocaine at work” is a “human right,” Fox News reported. Mills gracefully responded, “What the fuck?” That, Cockburn notes, is not a no.

The man followed up with a more straightforward question: “How much more does an eight-ball cost with inflation?” Unfortunately, Mills did not give the reporter current street prices and instead chose to walk away. (The answer is around $180 in DC, per Cockburn’s law enforcement sources.)

A 1995 Justice Department investigation “into allegations that she bought and used cocaine” was made public last Friday, contradicting Mills’s long-told defense that the allegations were the result of a politically motivated smear. The DoD document outlined the timeline of the allegations and investigation, challenging Mills’s account – though ultimately no charges were filed.

In 1990, a Bureau of Intergovernmental Drug Enforcement agent “inadvertently delivered to Ms. Mills’ office a file containing a transcript of a recorded conversation in which a drug purchaser implicated her in cocaine use.” A flurry of letters between BIDE and Mills’s lawyers ensued, and in 1991, she said publicly she was “the victim of a smear campaign, that BIDE was conducting an abusive investigation of her and that she intended to sue BIDE officials,” per the investigation.

Throughout the early 1990s, Mills claimed several times that her cocaine-centered investigation was riddled with errors, but the 1995 report concluded that “no wrongdoings occurred.”

“All of Ms. Mills’ charges that federal prosecutors committed misconduct are unsubstantiated. The USAO in Maine conducted a proper investigation of serious allegations; no misconduct of any kind can fairly be attributed to any member of that office,” the report concluded.

Alleged drug use is not the main reason Mills’s name has popped up in the early months of the Trump administration, sadly. Attorney General Pam Bondi has demanded Maine prohibit biological men from participating in women’s sports after a transgender competitor won the girls’ state championship in pole vaulting – and Mills has resisted.

At the National Governors Association dinner in late February, President Trump told Governor Mills from his pulpit, “You’d better comply otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding. See you in court.”

Since his threats, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has launched an investigation into Maine’s Education Department over Title IX violations – and the federal government has frozen $3 million in funding to the state’s education system.