Why did Dems ignore Platner's red flags for so long?

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1:03This is a global production. It is a poor me speech from Graham Plattner. He's denied those allegations. He's called them troubling, serious and categorically untrue. She went on for 11 and a half minutes in this stream of self-pity and self-righteousness and very, very little self-awareness. An alleged assaulter or an alleged racist or having to have a Nazi tattoo emblazoned on your chest. Democrats just don't quite know yet who they are, what they are, why they are. Hey everyone, it's Cram Plattner here. I think as many of you know over the past couple days I have faced some very serious allegations and I just want to make it clear this is all false.

1:55the things that have been claimed did not happen. It's not real. It has placed an immense amount of weight on me as I think about what needs to happen now. In that gravelly voice, Graham Plattner announces that he's halting his campaign for the Senate in the state of Maine. There were so many allegations against him. Why on earth did the Democrats just choose to ignore his accusers for so long? And what does it say about the Democratic Party's identity? Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Maitlis. And if you are wondering why we are talking about a guy called Graham Plattner, that is a perfectly legitimate question.

2:56He was the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Maine. Maine is a tiny state in the northeast of America that has very few electoral college votes, never decides a presidential election. So who cares? Well, actually, it speaks about so much because Graham Plattner had was the kind of key person that could swing the Senate in November for the Democrats up against the Republican, longstanding Republican, Susan Collins. He ran this insurgent campaign and he ran this insurgent campaign by being a candidate who was outside the norm. And the Democratic Party thought we need people like this. We need people that will ruffle feathers, who aren't stereotypical candidates that are out of central casting.

3:41We want someone different, except it's turned out that he's a bit too different. Yeah, look, if you are a fan of Plattner, you will recognise him as a populist progressive. His whole platform is about affordable housing, about universal health care, about reducing the power of billionaires. He was endorsed very early on by the arch populist progressive Bernie Sanders. And at that point, a lot of the Democrats rallied around this man that they thought was an authentic voice, who was a real man, who was somebody the voters would get behind. And to be fair, when things started out, it was not Plattner himself who put himself forwards.

4:24It was other people. It was people who thought that as an oyster fisherman, as an oyster farmer, as a local man of Maine, he would reach parts of the electorate that other politicians couldn't reach. So they approached him and they said, could you imagine standing for the Senate? He resisted at first. He went along with it afterwards. And then what proceeded to happen was a very rushed vetting system. And these are the kind of things that they missed along the way. If you've listened to our episodes in the past, you'll be familiar with some of this. He was found to have made comments on Reddit that asked why, for example, black people don't tip.

5:03This came from his time as a waiter at a bar in Washington. He suggested that rape victims should choose the company they keep and the underwear that they wear to avoid having unwanted sex. He was then found to have been sexting various women. He is married and he sent his wife forward to kind of defend what was going on. This was all very quickly after he'd been sort of pushed forward as the potential candidate. And in May of this year, the New York Times ran a piece with a few women that came forward, one of them in particular who said she was an ex-girlfriend. She had been not sexually assaulted by him, but kind of manhandled.

5:48She'd been sort of slightly roughly treated. She'd been locked in a door. He'd had a hand behind her back. She described behaviour which was kind of just creepy and weird. And what happened? Graham Plattner went on air to defend it, to call her a liar. And a lot of the establishment, Democratic establishment, rallied round Plattner and basically said, oh, this woman, she's a conservative. She's a Republican. She's trying to bring him down. So they went along with his candidacy and he went through the primaries getting 72 percent of the vote. And that all seemed to be kind of stitched into place that none of the Democrats minded about this baggage.

6:29Oh, I forgot to mention the Nazi tattoo, which he said he didn't even recognise as being a Nazi tattoo. He then had to have it covered up when it was pointed out to him. So there were all these red flags along the way, whether it's about the racism, whether it's about the Nazism, whether it's about the sexting, whether it's about women literally saying they were manhandled in relationships. and then it all came to a head on Monday, Tuesday of this week. When Politico broke a story and Jake Tapper from CNN then interviewed a woman, Jenny Rassico, a 41-year-old who described how, essentially, he came into her house as a former partner and raped her.

7:08He was heavily intoxicated, had intentions with me and wasn't listening when I said no. And you were saying, no, don't, no, don't. over and over and over. I remember, um, you know, obviously I've had to recall a lot of this. This is something that I tried for many years to forget. And so small details, um, you know, might get past me, but yes, I remember very specifically saying, I'm not into this. I remember that the most sort of saying that the most firmly. I remember specifically him like grabbing at my chest and I like hit his hand and I said, don't touch me. And I remember that during the altercation.

7:49And then he kept going. Yeah. I know that you have been very reluctant to tell this story. Very reluctant. Yeah. I'm actually surprised you're here. I've thrown up three times today. Is that right? Yeah. Why did you ultimately decide to do it? Why, why come forward? A few reasons. One of the biggest ones is that I think that there are a lot of men in this world relying on the silence of women. So that was the moment when the small red flags of which there had been many suddenly became a giant red flag. And Democrats who had been can't see it. No, can't hear it. Don't want to look. It's all fine.

8:36He'll be OK. Suddenly came out and said, oh, we do have a problem. and all these progressives who had been turning this blind eye suddenly were saying he's got to withdraw, he's got to pull out, he's got to suspend his campaign, we've got to find a new candidate and sure enough the pressure became irresistible and Graham Plattner, we played a small clip of it at the top of the podcast but it's worth listening to it a bit longer because he went on for 11 and a half minutes in this stream of self-pity and self-righteousness and very, very little self-awareness. It's not the false allegations, though, that have brought us to where we are.

9:22It's the fact that they are being used by the political establishment to put structural pressure on us.

9:37We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish. That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.

10:00What we have accomplished here, you made possible. The people of Maine. the volunteers, the voters, the grassroots donors. And I have all the faith in the world that we could win if we could continue to harness that. But the brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us. It is a poor me speech from Graham Plattner. He's denied those allegations. He's called them troubling, serious and categorically untrue. And you can hear from the tone there that it is everyone else's fault but his, that he was just striving to bring something new to politics and he was brought down by the Washington elite.

10:51Now, I'm going to presume it is possible for the Democrats to find somebody who can reach main voters without being an alleged rapist. I'm going to assume it is possible to espouse policies of affordable housing and health care and equality without being an alleged assaulter or an alleged racist or having to have a Nazi tattoo emblazoned on your chest. It shouldn't be that hard for the party to find someone. And do you remember that phrase that people used to use about Donald Trump at the beginning? They said that Trump was a poor man's idea of what a rich person looked like. Like he had the jet and he had the champagne and he had the gold and he had the chandeliers.

11:43That was kind of how if you didn't have money, you imagined money would look. And there is something about Plattner and those who have kind of facilitated his rise, which is a sort of rich man trying to work out what a poor man or an authentic politician would sound like. And presumably this is not what main voters have to settle for. It's really interesting that not only has Graham Platt in a kind of eschewed all kind of sense of responsibility here or even acknowledgement, but he has technically or not technically, he has he has orally pulled himself out of the race. But technically, his name is still on the ballot.

12:26So as we're recording this on Friday morning, his name is still on the ballot and it will remain on the ballot until Monday the 13th, next Monday. And if he doesn't physically file the paperwork to remove his name, then his name will go through. And so you're kind of you're in this weird place at the moment where he suspended his campaign. And when we say suspended, it's very clear that the reason he's pulled out is not through some sense of sort of shame or kind of regret. it's because major Democrats around him, including Ro Khanna, who was very much behind the release of the Epstein files, including Chuck Schumer, have pulled their financial support.

13:05They've said he won't get a dime on this campaign. In other words, he has no financial route through to this. But he's still leaving his name on the ballot until Monday. He's made that a thing, whilst the Democrats are now running around trying to find a person to replace him in a way that is starting to feel a little bit similar to the whole Biden debacle, where they knew that Biden had to go and they didn't know who came in afterwards. And they'd left it all bloody late because Monday is the day for him to pull out finally. And they only have till the end of the month to submit somebody new.

13:38And so they're in a complete pickle. And actually, it is their own fault. Yeah, it is. And look, you know, this was because they wanted to go for a candidate who would be different from the mainstream. And they've seen what's happened in the Republican Party with Donald Trump, who, you know, casts aside all convention and decides that he is going to run because of who he is. And even despite all the things standing against him, you know, he's got the, you know, the criminal convictions, the two time impeachments, all the rest of it, he's going to run. I think it does say something about our politics, which is really interesting and it's worth dwelling on.

14:15All this week on the News Agents UK, we've been talking about Nigel Farage forcing a by-election and saying it is the people versus the establishment. More as it is exactly what Graham Plattner was saying to the people of Maine, that the establishment was against him. no question, no sort of self-reflection whether I might have done something wrong that has led me to this position, but that if people are trying to bring me down, it's the establishment. Well, maybe, as you say, Emily, it's not that unreasonable that you have a candidate who hasn't got rape allegations against them, a Nazi tattoo, sexting and all the rest of it that we have sort of documented in this podcast.

14:58You know, is it too much to ask that a politician have a little bit of self-awareness of what they are. And so you've seen it in Britain with Nigel Farage. You've seen it in France with the Rassemblement National leader Marine Le Pen this week. You see it on a daily basis with Donald Trump, where he talks about himself as the victim, as having been wronged by the swamp in Washington. And so it goes on. And there is never any self-reflection. Maybe it's down to me. I would just say, I mean, the only thing I'd say, and this is not to excuse Plattner's behaviour, but I do think the people who rallied around him and who were so keen to ignore the flags, as you say, really do share a lot of that blame.

15:45You know, I was listening to sort of, you know, the sort of the Democrat bros podcast kind of going, oh, we've just got to go to Maine and convince those older women not to vote for Susan Collins. Like it was the fault of the women of Maine that they couldn't see through the beauty of they couldn't see. They couldn't see to the beauty of Graham Plattner. And there was something really condescending about the whole thing. You know, even now there are people saying that you're just trying to bring him down. You're just trying to get rid of a good man. And I do think, you know, to my earlier point, Plattler didn't originally put himself forward.

16:22He was sort of pulled out. You know, he was he was sort of given the golden ticket. You'll be fine. Don't worry about things. It'll be fine. You're an authentic voice. He was made to feel that this was fine by a Democratic Party who was clearly so desperate to win that Senate seat that they were just ignoring all the noise coming at them. And so, yeah, to your earlier point, where does it leave a party now who, I mean, this should be a walkover for the Dems. The midterms should be a walkover, given where Trump has left the world and indeed American economics and prices with the Iran war, with his policies on ICE and immigration, with the vague sense that he's kind of lost control of a lot of the conversations that are going on right now.

17:12Why aren't the Democrats finding this really easy? And arguably they should, you know, they should take back the House in November. But the Senate is within their grasp. But this is a fuck up. This is a really stupid thing to do. And it speaks, I think, to a party that still hasn't quite found its feet after the Biden fiasco and doesn't quite know its character in terms of what it's trying to find, who it's trying to put into power. Well, yeah, it's an identity crisis by any other definition. It doesn't know what it's for. It doesn't know the voters it's trying to reach. It doesn't know the messaging that it needs to get there.

17:56All it seems to have alighted on is the fact that it needs to have candidates who look and sound different from the convention. And there was that guy, John Fetterman, who won the Senate seat in Pennsylvania when people thought maybe, the Republicans were going to take that. And he had tattoos and he wore a hoodie and he was a big lumbering fellow. And he got there. And then they look at Zoramah Mdani, who, again, is not out of central casting, who wins the mayor of New York. And then you've got James Tallarico in Texas, who, again, is very different as well, but a very religious man, but very, very effective.

18:30And so they decide that the candidates we need shouldn't be square jawed, chiselled, ex-Yale and Harvard Law School people. They should be people who are a bit rough around the edges. But then you don't do the checking on it and you end up with the fiasco that you've got. Emily, years ago, I worked with a producer who had been a model and she told me she was up for a bra advert for Marks and Spencer. And they said to her, you've got a lovely face for this advert, but you just haven't got the tits. And you just think that there is a sort of element have done that with Graham Platt. Oh, we love the fact that you're unconventional.

19:09Oh, rape allegations. Oh, yeah, no, no, that's a bit too far. And I think that the Democrats just don't quite know yet who they are, what they are, why they are. Well, let's just listen. You mentioned John Fetterman. And as you say, he was the sort of original model for being, you know, for the Democrats finding these sort of alternative voices, alternative faces to their party. But even he is absolutely excoriating about the Platner scandal. Just listen. What Democrats saw in that trash bag, what did they see in this guy? Was it the Nazi tattoo? Was the gross messages online, the way he roughs up women?

19:52And now, like, what's, you know, like, why did you go in on this dirt bag? But yeah, it's like, this is your legacy, P-Hustle. And now, adios, trash bag. Look, I mean, Fetterman comes from a very different wing of the party to Plattner, you know, sort of ideologically, politically. But still, he's kind of spelling it out for his whole party. Zoramandani, who I think would be closer to the Plattner sort of policy platform, was in quite a difficult position because he is one of those who had endorsed Plattner. And we've seen recently Mamdani's endorsement of some characters who are definitely on the slightly dodgy side too.

20:38And this is Mamdani having to recognize he got it wrong. Do you think that Graham Plattner should drop out of the race? And do you have any intention of endorsing any candidates in competitive races outside of New York, El Saeed or anyone else? I believe that it's time for him to drop out of the race. And when it comes to my own endorsements, I've made eight endorsements at the state and federal level. They've all been right here in New York City. I'm incredibly excited at the fact that they won their races. And that's where my focus is for now. Yeah. So Zoram Mabdani saying I might have got that one wrong in Maine.

21:12The one person we should say who is loving every single moment of this. No surprise. Spoiler alert. It is the president of the United States, Donald Trump, who is saying he feels sorry for Graham Plattner. Do you think that the Democrats should be able to pick a replacement for Graham Plattner? He's had all these new allegations that have come out. Now Democrats are talking about picking a replacement for him. Should they be able to do that? They're picking what? A replacement for Graham Plattner if he steps out of the race. So he won the primary. And now there's these new allegations. It's very hard for them to do.

21:44And it's really a question of whether or not you believe the woman. A lot of people say big falsehoods. He's in a bind. he's in a bind but should they be able to do it well i guess he's gonna lose i would imagine he's gonna lose you could see the contortions that donald trump was going through there answering the point well it could be false allegations because of course a court has just enforced the four million dollar fine on donald trump for the civil case that was bought brought by E. Jean Carroll, alleging that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her. And a court believed her. And so, you know, this goes back a couple of years.

22:30But this week they announced that Donald Trump had to pay up. No more waiting around on that one. So Donald Trump is very fond of believing there are false allegations made by a lot of women when it comes to sexual allegations. I don't see the contortions there at all. I think Trump was absolutely on brand that Plattner has now been welcomed into the fold as a victim, a victim of mendacious women. And presumably a little silver lining in this, the Graham Plattner. He is now possibly eligible for money from that 1776 victim slug fund. I mean, who knows where this goes from now? But essentially, yeah, the Democrats did not want to have a character who could be sort of aligned with Donald Trump because ideologically they're very different.

23:16But right now they're looking like they're sort of cast from the same old basket. Yeah. And they have got to find a candidate. They've got to get a campaign together. they've got to try and get Plattner on board so that he doesn't become a writing candidate where disaffected Democrats in Maine to just write his name and don't vote for the Democratic candidate which you can do in that state and they are against the clock and so Susan Collins must be having the best week she could have possibly imagined with all that has unfolded and the Democrats once again looking like they've screwed it up. Yeah, there are about 10 potential candidates to replace Plattner.

23:57And I think that is a problem in itself because it is so divided. I mean, one of the candidates was standing originally for main governor. And because time is so short, he's just pulled his main governor signs out of the shed, crossed out governor and now put senator. So they have so little time to get their act together to actually fight this campaign. And they're all being asked whether they wanted Plattner's endorsement. Because here's the curious thing. For the voters, Plattner was clearly a bit of, you know, Prozac, a bit of adrenaline. He, as I said, he won the primary by 72%. And so they're now being asked, and we should say that Plattner at one point suggested that he would pull out the race if he could be in charge of selecting the person who replaced him.

24:46I mean, how on earth does that make sense? So each of the candidates have now been asked, would you like Plattner's endorsement? Would you like Plattner's endorsement? And here is a sense of what most of them have said. In other words, they have to keep him at arm's length, but we still want the voters. He got more votes than any Democratic nominee, I think, in Maine's history for Senate. Do you want his endorsement? Would you take it if he offered it to you? I have not sought Mr. Plattner's endorsement, nor would I accept it if he offered it to me. What I do want, however, Caitlin, is the support and the enthusiasm of his supporters.

25:22Earlier today, I had a press conference announcing my run. And the first two, in fact, the only two speakers at that press conference, other than myself, were two women who were strong organizers, volunteers, and participants in Graham Plattner's campaign. And they talked about at that press conference how and why they are choosing to redirect their energies to my campaign. And so what I'm looking for is the support of Graham's supporters. I am not looking for his support. That was Nirav Shah. I don't want his endorsement. The last thing I want in the world is his endorsement. I couldn't want anything less in my whole life.

25:59I just want his supporters, please, if that's OK. The Democrats are in a right old mess in Maine. One of the most winnable seats in the Senate that they were hoping would be the difference between success and failure, between control and not control. And it's all going terribly, terribly wrong. We'll be back in just a moment.

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