Augusta resident Troy Jackson, the former Senate President from Allagash, has secured the Maine Democratic Party’s inside nod to take over the U.S. Senate nomination, a seat vacated by his disgraced communist-socialist bestie, Graham Platner.
The national media are now racing to figure out who Jackson is and whether he’ll offer a similar bonanza for political reporters. So what’s in store for readers of the New York and DC press when they get the pleasure of learning about Action Jackson?
Let’s take a stroll through the Book of Troy… But first: Subscribe to The Robinson Report if you haven’t already. Someone has to pay for The Maine Wire’s next adventure up to Allagash…
5. The Allagash Recount
First, let’s go back to the spring of 2023, to the town of Allagash — population roughly 240. That year, Jackson decided he wanted a seat on the Allagash select board.
Now, this was already a little peculiar. At the time, Jackson was the single most powerful legislator in the State of Maine — the President of the Maine Senate. He was also, as we later confirmed, living full-time down in a condo in Augusta, roughly a five-hour drive from the town whose potholes he suddenly wished to superintend. But for the Jacksons, politics has always been the family business, and no office is too small when there’s a family name to plant on it.
In the run-up to the vote, Jackson’s lobbyist son, Chace Jackson (we’ll hear more about him later), started leaning on the locals. The message to town officials was a shot across the bow: he said he was working with an investigative reporter and the Attorney General to sniff around some “ethics” concerns in little Allagash.
Here’s how town clerk Susan McBreairty — a woman who’d been running Allagash’s elections for twelve years — remembered the pitch: he was “working with the Attorney General’s office and an investigative journalist to figure out how much” an unidentified party “may be trying to unduly influence the election.”
Big if, true. But it wasn’t. The Attorney General’s office and the district attorney both confirmed they’d never spoken to any Jackson about ballot tampering in Allagash. Chace later conceded he’d, shall we say, embellished the AG part, and had actually meant his personal attorney. Who among us hasn’t confused our personal attorney with the Attorney General when making vague threats about a select board election our dad was running in? An easy mix-up. Happens to the best of us. McBreairty put it more plainly: “I called the Attorney General and they didn’t know nothing about it.”
Jackson himself followed up with a veiled threat of his own, just so nobody up there mistook the family's seriousness. This is how the Senate President spends his spring: menacing a twelve-year town clerk in a town of 240.
Come Election Day, March 24, the good people of Allagash rendered their verdict: Karie Kelly 78, Troy Jackson 70. An eight-vote loss for the most powerful legislator in the state.
Jackson conceded. And then, a few days later, Jackson un-conceded.
The Allagash select board election had been rigged against him, despite the Jackson family putting the local bumpkins on notice that they were ready to bring the hammer down on any election funny business.
He demanded a recount.
Come recount day, April 11 — Troy was right!
The hand recount of the original hand count turned up an error. The corrected tally: Kelly 77, Jackson 71. An error rate of 0.67 percent. He still lost, of course. Six votes instead of eight. But thanks to his strident, unflagging concern for election integrity, the annals of Allagash history now record the correct result. Democracy, as they say, dies in darkness — and it very nearly perished in the Allagash ballot box until Action Jackson rode in to save it.
4. The BIW Shakedown
Troy Jackson built a career defending the interests of Maine’s small but energetic labor unions, sometimes a little too aggressively. Throughout 2019, while Jackson was a state senator, his financial disclosures showed him on the payroll of a loggers union. That union listed its headquarters at the Lisbon office of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the union that represents some of the workers at Bath Iron Works (BIW), a subsidiary of defense contractor General Dynamics.
In December 2019, Jackson co-signed a letter, alongside then-House Speaker Sara Gideon (D-Freeport), to BIW brass. The letter concerned a tax break the state legislature had extended for the shipyard in 2018. That tax break was worth $45 million and stretched through 2036, conditioned on BIW keeping some 5,500 workers on the payroll.
Jackson, in the letter, scolded BIW President Dirk Lesko for failing to live up to “their end of the bargain,” pointed to the shipyard’s recently reported plans to bring in out-of-state contractors, complained about declining average wages, and mused, with all the studied casualness of a cartoon mobster cracking his knuckles, that it would be “unfortunate” if the Legislature were to reconsider the company’s tax break.
“We championed this legislation based on the promise of continued good-paying jobs at the BIW shipbuilding facility,” Jackson and Gideon said. “It would be unfortunate if the Legislature had to reconsider this special tax credit because of the ever-growing evidence that BIW has not lived up to their end of the bargain.”
The thrust of Jackson’s threat was that BIW needed to funnel more of its payroll through the same union he was receiving payments from if they wanted to keep the tax credits. Coincidentally, Jackson was on the payroll of a union based in the same building as the IAMAW, a.k.a. the union that would have benefited had the threat succeeded.
Lesko, because he has an IQ above room temperature, immediately realized that the letter amounted to proof that Democratic lawmakers were attempting a naked shakedown. The letter quickly appeared in the Portland Press Herald, but nothing more ever came of it.
Now, in a serious state, this would have prompted a criminal investigation into whether Jackson violated the law. At a minimum, it would have marred his reputation and ended his political career. But we’re in Maine. So the Democrat Senate President threatening to withhold millions of dollars in tax breaks from the fourth largest employer was barely a scandal.
3. The Great Potato Shakedown
On March 5, 2020, Sue McCrum, the matriarch of one of the oldest and largest potato empires in the state, walked into the Secretary of State’s office and filed papers to run for State Senate District 2. She was going after a vulnerable Democratic incumbent, Michael Carpenter. Carpenter, who was Maine’s attorney general in the 1990s, was also a Democratic ally of Jackson’s.
Less than 24 hours later, McCrum quit. She was out before her paperwork even showed up on the state ethics website. No reason for the about-face was given. No explanation that made any sense to the people who knew her. One day, a serious candidate with a serious name and serious money behind her; the next day, poof.
So what happened? Why did Sue McCrum abandon her plans for the state legislature?
The answer, according to half a dozen people familiar with the events surrounding her decision, lies in an obscure provision the Legislature enacted on June 19, 2019.
Nine months before McCrum’s overnight vanishing act, the Legislature rammed through an emergency bill creating a narrow, custom-fit tax credit for food processing. On paper, it was broad economic development: a 1.8 percent annual break on certain business investments between $35 and $100 million, stretched out over nineteen years. In practice, it was a provision that only applied to Penobscot McCrum’s investment in a major new facility in Washburn. For the McCrum family, the tax break was worth somewhere between $11.9 million and $34.2 million.
The sponsor of that multimillion-dollar carve-out was none other than the Senate President from Allagash: Troy Jackson.
According to people familiar with the matter, Jackson picked up the phone and called Jay McCrum, Sue’s husband and the man who runs the company. And the message, as it was described to me, was not subtle: pull your wife out of this race, or you’re going to have an eight-figure problem.
Just as Jackson told BIW “it would be unfortunate” if they didn’t reward his employer with more union members, sources say Jackson told McCrum that he would use his legislative power to nix the tax credit if he didn’t pull his wife out of the race.
That’s according to sources who requested anonymity to speak, not the McCrums.
When contacted about Sue’s abrupt withdrawal from the race and Jackson’s role in the decision, the McCrums declined to comment on the record.
The McCrums’ reluctance to talk on the record may have changed following the sale of Penobscot McCrum to McCain Foods on November 12, 2025. Having sold the family company, the McCrums no longer have a pain point Jackson can squeeze to keep them quiet. In an ominous sign for Jackson, the McCrums appear to be fans of Susan Collins.
According to state and federal campaign finance records, the McCrums donated to Collins in 2002, 2008, 2020, and 2026. Perhaps, in addition to a $200 check, the McCrums will donate an on-the-record comment or a starring role in a 30-second ad…
2. The Gun Control Flipflop
For two decades, Troy Jackson was the rural Democrat the gun lobby could count on. He earned an A- from the pro-gun Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM) in 2004 and high marks from the NRA in 2008 and 2010. He was endorsed by the NRA as recently as 2022 and took an award from SAM in 2023. He earned those ratings, too. In 2023, he voted against a 72-hour waiting period, against expanded background checks on private sales, and against a bump stock ban. On guns, his record was about as pro-Second Amendment as a Democrat’s gets in Augusta.
Then Chace Jackson, his aforementioned lobbyist son, started cashing those gun control checks.
According to a report from the Bangor Daily News, the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, a 501(c)4 advocacy group funded, in part, by New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg, hired Resurgam Group in Dec. 2023.
Resurgam Group is the firm where Chace Jackson is a partner. It was founded by Jackson’s former chief of staff, B.J. McCollister, and also employs another ex-Jackson staffer, Max Rush. For the 2024 and 2025 legislative years, Maine Ethics Commission documents show Resurgam Group disclosed more than $50,000 in compensation for lobbying work related to gun control bills, with Chace Jackson described as the lobbyist associate handling the accounts in 2024. The payments started weeks before Jackson would begin his last session of the legislature as Senate President.
Jackson had spent twenty years touting himself as a gritty, pro-gun sportsman from the woods of northern Maine. As recently as 2023, Jackson voted “No” on LD 60, LD 1304, and LD 168 in 2023. Those bills were, respectively, an extended waiting period, an assault weapons ban, and background checks.
But he suddenly flipped his position on guns right after the Resurgam contract. At a Jan. 2024 event held by his then employer, the 501(c)4 group “Food and Medicine,” Jackson said he would support an assault weapons ban, a “red flag” law, a 72-hour waiting period, and background checks on private firearm transfers — three of the exact measures he had voted against within the past year.
Jackson’s defense was that the Oct. 25, 2023 mass shooting in Lewiston opened his eyes. In other words, Jackson continued to oppose gun control measures after the Las Vegas shooting, the Pulse nightclub shooting, Sandy Hook, and Parkland. And, as is typically the case when Democrats seize on a tragedy to push their gun control agenda, none of the measures that Jackson flipped on would have prevented the Lewiston gunman, Robert Card, Jr., from obtaining firearms.
Jackson would not be the first politician, Democrat or Republican, to shift positions as their eyes turned toward higher office, like a gubernatorial bid or a U.S. Senate seat. The timeline, however, is damning: a billionaire-funded gun control group needed the most important vote in the State House, that group started paying the lobbying firm where the Senate President’s son works, and the Senate President reversed a twenty-year position in favor of the group writing the checks. The records don’t show Troy Jackson took the money himself. It went to his son’s firm. But that structure is precisely what makes questions about the payments unavoidable: it’s the arrangement you’d design if you wanted the benefit of a quid pro quo while maintaining plausible deniability.
As the Allagash Election Integrity saga revealed, for the Jacksons, politics is a family business.
1. The Augusta Fraud
In 2019, Jackson bought a home in Augusta — more than 200 miles from his district in Allagash. He financed the purchase with an FHA loan, the federal program built for low-income, first-time buyers that comes with a lower interest rate. FHA loans has come with an occupancy clause: you have to make the home your primary residence for at least year. Jackson initialed that page.
Then he told the Maine State Ethics Commission a different story so he could be Senate President. From 2019 to 2021, while Jackson was bound by the occupancy clause in his mortgage, he swore in multiple campaign filings that he lived in Allagash. Those two residency claims cannot both be true.
Under federal law, signing a mortgage document you never intend to honor or violating the agreement amounts to mortgage fraud. On the other hand, if Jackson did fulfill his obligations under the loan agreement, then he would have been ineligible under Maine’s state constitution to hold the Allagash seat. A real Aroostook catch-22.
The details of Jackson’s penny-penching real estate ploy became public, in part, because he sued the older couple who sold the Augusta house, alleging the sellers hid problems like smoke damage and bugs. The sellers produced records showing everything had been disclosed. The lawsuit collapsed, but not before discovery surfaced something worse: Jackson had also filed an insurance claim for damage he elsewhere insisted predated his ownership.
Like with his residency, Jackson made two mutually exclusive claims about the damage to the house, with each claim tailored to whatever was financially advantageous for him. In the insurance claim, the damage happened while Jackson owned the house. In the lawsuit, the damaged house was sold to him unethically and without disclosure. Similarly, if the damage happened after he bought the house, his statements in the lawsuit were false. If the damage happened before he owned the house, then his statements to the insurance company were bogus. On the one hand, you have a potential case of perjury, and, on the other hand, you have what would amount to insurance fraud.
When The Maine Wire laid all of this out in 2024, Jackson caught brief media scrutiny and an Ethics complaint. His defense was that he never read the mortgage he signed and initialed on every page, occupancy clause included. “This is unfortunate, but I never really read the forms,” he told the Portland Press Herald. Note the word unfortunate. Nothing is unfortunate if everything was legal and he honored the loan agreement. The only way that comment makes sense is if reading the document would have meant declining the occupancy clause and taking a standard loan at a higher rate. He also threw his own mortgage broker under the bus for supposedly setting him up, which is itself an admission that he made an unwise decision to sign a binding financial instrument. The broker denied Jackson’s allegations.
Jackson eventually sold the Augusta house for a six-figure capital gain, then kept living in Augusta full-time as a renter. Translation: he used a first-time, low-income homebuyer program to flip a house for profit.
All of this is a matter of public record that any reporter — or prosecutor — can verify.
So why no charges?
The only person who can answer that question is the Biden-era U.S. Attorney and longtime Aroostook County Democrat Darcie McElwee. McElwee was most certainly a fan of enforcing mortgage fraud laws against those who commit FHA loan fraud. The DOJ nailed Merton Weed, Jr. of Norway for FHA fraud — the same conduct — just months before the Maine Wire exposed Jackson’s financial dealings. She’s never explained why Jackson benefitted from her, er, prosecutorial discretion. Gov. Janet Mills later tapped McElwee for a judgeship, so she’s probably not coughing up any answers soon. For what it’s worth, the statute of limitations has not run out.
In case anyone wants them, here are the documents relevant to the lawsuit, Jackson’s mortgage, and the insurance claim.
p.s. Troy Jackson collected the largest amount of reimbursements for travel and lodging while he was living almost next to the State House — and the only one who had to approve the reimbursements was… Troy Jackson.
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
And Mr. Robinson, your writing is excellent.
How does Aroostook County produce such excellent fraudsters? For years we had John Martin and now Troy Jackson. Both have gotten kid glove treatment from the BDN. If it weren't for the Maine Wire, we would never know anything real about Maine government