Platner Promotes False Conspiracy Theory Alleging Collins Committed Financial Crimes
Republican Sen. Susan Collins responded to far left Democrat Graham Platner's allegations of criminal conduct in a statement posted to X on Friday.
Maine’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner staged a press event in Portland Thursday to accuse Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of profiting from her office.
Platner’s allegation was based on a bizarre leftist conspiracy theory that claims Collins funneled money to her husband’s consulting firm with a piece of legislation that passed the Senate unanimously five years before Collins was married.
Platner’s allegations of corruption drew a sharp response from Sen. Collins’ campaign.
“Today, a man I have never met held a press conference and accused me of criminal conduct,” Collins said on X.
“That is outrageous and false,” she said. “If Graham Platner wants to debate policy, I look forward to that conversation. But making reckless and defamatory accusations because you cannot defend your own record is beneath the people of Maine.”
Like any EdgeLord shitposter, Platner was giddy to have elicited a response from Collins. So he jumped on X to double-down on his allegations that Collins has committed crimes (while simultaneously denying that he was alleging she’s engaged in criminal conduct).
“She got incredibly wealthy, funneling taxpayer money to her husband & profiting off stock trading while in office (violating the STOCK Act 25 times),” he said. “In a reasonable society, that would be criminal.”
For the first-ever Robinson Report Fact-Check, I rate Graham Platner’s claim Four Portapotties on the Platner Lie-o-Meter.
So let’s dig into Platner’s allegation that Collins has used her office to self-enrich
Every U.S. Senator has to file financial disclosures that allow the public to get a basic picture of their net worth, their assets, their liabilities, and, nowadays, their stock trading activity (or the activity of their family members). Collins was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1997, but the first financial disclosures available online date to 2012 and cover the financial year beginning in 2011. This was just before she married her husband.
In that first financial disclosure, Collins disclosed assets of $110,005 to $300,000 and liabilities of $365,003 to $800,000. In other words, after two full terms in the U.S. Senate, Collins showed a negative net worth of between -$689,995 and -$65,003. Not exactly the portfolio of someone who has leveraged their office in Washington, D.C., to pad their bank account.
(Note: Congressional financial disclosures require members to disclose dollar value ranges for assets and liabilities, so any analysis of congressional net worth is necessarily a minimum/maximum assessment.)
The details of Collins’ 2012 disclosed assets are even more boring, almost raising the question of why she wasn’t taking a little more risk with bets on tech start-ups or blue-chip technology companies. She reported between $15,000 and $50,000 saved in a deferred compensation plan, a Fidelity IRA, a U.S. FCU savings account, and a Bangor Savings Bank account. Collins, then 59, reported an additional $50,000 to $100,000 in a separate Fidelity Asset Manager IRA. On the liabilities side, Collins reported two mortgages — her home in Maine and another house (likely in the D.C. area) — as well as a home equity line of credit.
That’s it. If there’s any mystery or intrigue around Collins’ financial disclosure, the question is why she was one of the poorest member of Congress. Here are the images of the oldest available disclosure for Collins.
However…
After 2012, Collins’ financial life rockets into the multi-millionaire stratosphere, a sure sign that she’d started trading stocks like the Wolf of Wall Street or, even worse, Nancy Pelosi and Ro Khanna… right? Right?
Well, no.
To understand this sudden spike in Collins’ net worth, you have to hop in the news archive time machine and travel back to 2012–2013 — the same time period in which Graham Platner wrote on Reddit, “Luttrell didn’t write the damn book, it was ghost written by a limey, and is war porn at its worst,” in reference to the story of Navy Cross and Purple Heart recipient Marcus Luttrell, the U.S. Navy SEAL who inspired the hit movie Lone Survivor.
Back to Collins: In 2012, she married Thomas A. Daffron at a small ceremony in her hometown of Caribou. (My invite must have gotten lost in the mail…) Prior to marrying Collins, Daffron had a diverse and lucrative career. He’d worked as chief of staff to several prominent senators, including former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, and he’d served as the vice president and chief operating officer for the Baltimore Orioles. In 2006, he joined Jefferson Consulting Group, where he worked until 2016.
Under U.S. Senate rules, members are required to include their spouses in their financial disclosures. The jump in net worth visible on Collins’ financial disclosures is almost entirely assets and income that Daffron brought to the marriage. (No word on whether he asked for a pre-nup.) Unlike Collins, Daffron’s disclosed finances show a man with a little more interest in taking risks and making savvy investments. In the 2013 disclosure, Collins reports basically the same asset and liability profile, along with a joint checking account ($50,000–$100,000) and a joint savings account ($15,000–$50,000). Every other asset and income stream on Collins’ disclosure — every single one — is reported as belonging to “Spouse,” a.k.a. Daffron.
Well… not every source of income. Collins did report receiving a grill, dishes and silverware, a painting, a vase, and a picnic basket — all as wedding gifts and all with values reported under $700. You can find the whole 2013 financial disclosure here:
As anyone can see from the 2013 disclosure, Mr. Susan Collins came to the marriage with a high net worth and a diverse array of investments, including some five-to-six-figure investments in popular ETFs and mutual funds. His reported net worth is anywhere from $1.2 million to $5.3 million — and that doesn’t include his annual income from his full-time job. When it comes to individual stocks, Daffron held modest ($1,000–$15,000) positions in dozens of popular publicly traded companies, including Chevron, Comcast, ConocoPhillips, DuPont, GE, General Mills, Heinz, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Amazon, Apple, and Google.
Now, you can hardly expect a communist to have a sophisticated understanding of high finance. Especially when their retirement strategy is designed around collecting a full military disability while waiting for Dad to die so you can inherit all the money Granddad made selling chairs. Compound interest, EBITDA, and the New York Stock Exchange might be a little hard for an “oysterman” like Graham Platner to wrap his brain around. But since 2012, the value of shares in those companies, especially the technology giants, has increased significantly. The appreciation of those stock prices, along with Daffron continuing to invest money in what appears to be the same way he’d been investing pre-2012, explains Collins’ entire increase in net worth.
To suggest Collins has corruptly profited from congressional insider trading, as Platner did Thursday, also elides her role in co-authoring the STOCK Act, which enhanced disclosures around congressional stock trading and prohibited certain kinds of trades. Indeed, it’s only because of the STOCK Act provisions that Collins supported that politicians are now required to promptly disclose stock market transactions made by them or related parties, as opposed to disclosing them once per year. These disclosures allow websites like Unusual Whales to closely monitor, almost in real time, the stock portfolios of politicians. So thanks to legislation backed by Susan Collins, we can see that her and her husband’s most recent year in the stock market has basically tracked the S&P 500 average. (The purple line is the Collins financial disclosure, while the tan line is the benchmark average.)
For comparison’s sake, here’s Nancy Pelosi’s lifetime trading against the S&P500…
Unusual Whales is also the website that produced the 2024 congressional trading report that found the value of Collins’ portfolio grew by 77.5 percent from Dec. 29, 2023, to Dec. 30, 2024 — an eyebrow-raising number that beat not only the S&P 500 benchmark but also Nancy Pelosi! However, as Unusual Whales discloses, the methodology is based on a simple percentage change in portfolio valuation. It doesn’t look at what individual stock performances may have driven the change. When you look at the individual stock performance, Collins’ (a.k.a. Daffron’s) strong performance is explained by the spectacular growth in valuations of large tech companies — the kind of tech companies that any member of the public could invest in.
For example, Daffron owned shares in Google, Amazon, and Apple, which saw their share prices climb by, respectively, +37.4%, +45.6%, and +31.6%. Similarly, Daffron owned Amphenol (+41.1%) and Raytheon (+40.2%). However, the real winning horse in the Collins-Daffron portfolio was NVIDIA, which has been an international stock market phenomenon, rising by 177.7% during the reporting period. However, the Unusual Whales data shows Daffron’s last purchase of NVDA stock was Jan. 6, 2022. In other words, the Collins-Daffron stock portfolio is basically what you would expect from a reasonably intelligent dude who has been a working professional most of his life and invested his money wisely.
Which brings us to Graham Platner, a guy whose finances resemble those of a man who blew his U.S. military paycheck on drugs and hookers in Bangkok. In his speech Thursday, Platner made a series of insinuated allegations — allegations that, if true, would amount to ethical violations or even crimes.
Here’s a look at some pieces from El Platner’s speech transcript:
“We must pass the Collins rule. Senators should not be able to funnel money to their spouses.”
First of all, you would have to be a real idiot with zero understanding of how Congress runs to think that anyone in Washington, D.C., is going to call something “The Collins Rule” unless the rule is that you’re not allowed to miss votes. But the important point is this: There is no evidence that Collins has funneled any money to Daffron.
“We have anti-nepotism laws, which prohibits members from putting family members on their payroll, but it says nothing about a spouse’s firm being enriched through winning contracts by agencies that that senator or congressperson oversees.”
Talk of nepotism is rich coming from a guy whose fake oyster business (it’s a hobby) has disclosed just $5,000 in sales, all of which comes from his birthing parent. The same guy is just counting down the hours until dear old Dad kicks the bucket (the same dad who bought his house for him) and he can inherit the family fortune. But if you really want to talk about nepotism, how about Platner putting his wife on the campaign payroll despite her only job experience being as a live-in nanny in Camden (ask her how that ended…) and an alleged teacher.
Platner’s actual criticism, to the extent there is some truth within the speech his DSA comrades wrote for him, pertains to a bill Collins co-authored with ex-Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in 2007.
The so-called “Accountability in Government Contracting Act” aimed to make small firms more competitive when bidding for federal contracts. It also added some oversight provisions and made changes to the inspectors general offices. The bill passed the Senate unanimously. That is, two of the most moderate senators in U.S. history introduced the bill, and every single Democrat and every single Republican voted for it.
That’s the true version of the bill. The Platner version of the bill is that Collins was so greedy that she introduced this bill and convinced every single senator to vote for it because she also could predict the future and predicted that one day she would be married to a man who would benefit from the bill. Seriously. That’s Platner’s claim. Platner is claiming that Collins only introduced this bill because it would benefit Jefferson Consulting Group, where her husband (five years into the future) worked.
The attack is so preposterous it could only have originated with someone who is, to borrow one of Platner’s favorite phrases, retarded. And, of course, it did: the original claim came from Salon, but it’s been regurgitated by Platnerista groupies like Maine AFL-CIO leader Andy O’Brien. There’s never been any evidence to suggest that Collins played any role whatsoever in directing contracts to the Jefferson Consulting Group. Moreover, while Daffron was working at Jefferson, Collins’ income disclosures show a more or less stable growth in net worth — not some massive spike in income or assets.
If Susan Collins can see into the future, as Graham Platner seems to believe, then you’d think her portfolio would perform a little better — maybe as good as Nancy Pelosi’s or Ro Khanna’s!
Platner is lying about Collins’ finances, but he’s correct to point out that Members of Congress have been found to trade on insider congressional knowledge, earning themselves millions of dollars. But if Platner wants to root out this corruption, he should start with Rep. Ro Khanna, who has endorsed Platner and is all over social media defending him and singing his praises.
Khanna, a California Democrat since 2017, doesn’t personally trade stocks — just like Collins. But the Khanna clan are busy little day traders with a knack for beating the market. He entered Congress with an estimated net worth of $45.8 million and now, by some estimates, is worth more than $200 million. Not bad on that $170,000 congressional salary… According to Quiver Quantitative, the Khanna clan has made 38,666 stock trades since he took office (total volume: $630.9 million). That’s earned them an impressive 112.1% over the S&P 500. Many of those trades have been connected to activity involving congressional committees on which Khanna sits.
A 2022 New York Times investigation found, for example, that the Khanna family traded stocks in 897 companies, 149 of which had potential conflicts with Khanna’s work as a congressman. An ethics complaint published this year notes that he (or his family) made 624 late filings to notify the proper authorities when his family is engaged in trading.
In other words, one of Graham Platner’s biggest cheerleaders in Congress is a habitual violator of the ethics law that Collins helped write.
It will shock no one that the guy who has been lying about his Nazi tattoo since last October (and lied to his current wife about his serial sexting adultery and his account on the “predator’s paradise” app Kik) would also lie about his opponent in the U.S. Senate race. But the actual details and facts are important to put on the record — even if that kind of thing doesn’t matter to communist-socialists like P-Hustle.
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