All through the last three weeks of Maine's 1996 U.S. Senate campaign, Republican Susan Collins played the victim. She reacted strongly to a front page story in the Bangor Daily News by political reporter John Day that Collins was being "shadowed" by a "dirt-for-hire" private investigator with "a checkered past," someone hired by the Democrats. She adamantly demand an apology from her opponent Joe Brennan, despite mounting evidence that he had done nothing wrong -- and neither had Robert Norris, the researcher in question, who had simply asked to look at a public record.
Collins was quoted in two newspapers in southern Maine as saying that her first inkling of what she called "dispicable" behavior and a kind of "surveillance" was when reporter John Day telephoned her to ask for a comment two days before his front page story appeared.
Collins won the election by about 32,000 votes, with all but about 1,500 of that vote differential in the monopolistic Bangor Daily News circulation area.
Was Susan Collins lying when she portrayed herself as a victim?
Or, did both Susan Collins' campaign manager Bob Tyrer and reporter John Day commit perjury when they contradicted her published remarks during a libel trial three years later? Were the two men lying when they testified under oath that it was Susan Collins and her campaign staff who had leaked information to John Day, then helped him orchestrate the campaign his paper waged against Brennan?
The answer to The Collins Question is in my new book A Tale of Dirty Tricks So Bizarre: Susan Collins v. Public Record.
Before the book came a whole list of articles, including one investigative piece and three columns written by me (Jean Hay), and a reprint of campaign consultant Robert Norris' astonishing op-ed piece in the Bangor Daily News, all of which have been posted on this web page for several years.
Not posted until recently are scanned copies of several of the documents around which this controversy swirled. These include the Norris request form for Susan Collins' financial disclosure statement, the actual eight-page Financial Disclosure Statement he received, and a print-out of the e-mail that John Day sent to Robert Tyrer and, inadvertently, to a staffer at the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.
Also newly posted are excerpts of sworn testimony by reporter John Day and campaign manager Robert Tyrer, clearly refuting Susan Collins' statements to reporters that she was not the initial source of the information used by Day.
All of these articles and documents are compiled and woven into the book A Tale of Dirty Tricks So Bizarre, Susan Collins v. Public Record.
As we move into this election year, it is good to have a historical perspective on how our elected official conducted herself, even at the very beginning. This was an evolving story. Notice that each article reproduced here has a publication date. As you read each piece, please consider when it was written -- before, during, or after the successful libel suit against the Bangor Daily News by Robert Norris.
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