We are still feeling the effects of the enormously bitter and personally destructive fight to block Justice Brett Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court.
A Maine woman has been charged in federal court in connection to an October 2018 ricin scare directed at Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, whose vote helped put Trump’s second Supreme Court nomination over the finish line.
Bangor Daily News reports:
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Daffron received the letter, which was addressed to him, on Oct. 15 while at the couple’s West Broadway home alone. Collins was in Washington, D.C., but returned later that day to be with her husband. The couple was quarantined for a time at the house with their Labrador retriever, Pepper, the Associated Press reported at the time.
The affidavit claims, “The typed and unsigned letter said, ‘Good Luck to you and Susan in the next life’ and stated ‘Your wife has betrayed the people of Maine along with the American people and this will be her downfall.’”
Muscara sent Collins a second communication two days later containing a powder the sender claimed was anthrax, the report adds. The second letter was intercepted by a U.S. Postal Service sorting facility in Hampden, Maine. FBI investigators soon determined the powder was, in fact, starch. Federal agents were also able to pull a partial fingerprint off the envelope, which reportedly led them to Muscara, who was arrested Friday. She now faces up to 10 years in federal prison.
The first letter, the one which claimed Collins had “betrayed” the people of Maine, arrived at the senator’s home 10 days after she announced she would vote to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Though the affidavit makes no mention of whether the threatening letter mentioned Kavanaugh by name, Daffron told a local newsroom that the note made an explicit reference to the senator’s decision to confirm the judge.
Because Collins was one of three moderate senators whose votes would decide whether Kavanaugh would be seated on the court, the Maine senator was targeted specifically for vicious harassment by activists who wanted to see the conservative judge’s confirmation scuttled.
“It was unlike anything I have seen in all the years that I’ve been privileged to serve in the Senate,” Collins told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum in a December 2018 interview. “There was an envelope that arrived a few days after the ricin envelope and letter that had white powder in it. And fortunately, the Postal Service inspector did a great job at intercepting it. And you have to treat everything like that seriously. It said, ‘Anthrax; ha, ha, ha.’ … My husband and our dog and parts of our house had to be quarantined.”
The day after Collins announced she would support Kavanaugh, the Senate voted to put him on the Supreme Court in spite of the unverified, and mostly unbelievable, allegations of sexual misconduct that had been brought against him.
“[H]azmat teams [were] brought in,” Collins added in her December interview on Fox News. “But what was even worse was what was done to my staff. They had to be subjected to all sorts of abuse. A 25-year-old caseworker on my staff who deals with social security problems and the VA and immigration answered a call in which the man told her that if I voted yes for Justice Kavanaugh that he hoped that she would be raped and impregnated.”
That staffer later quit, the senator said, adding that some staff “just could not take the tremendous abuse that was heaped upon them.”
