On Wednesday, September 30, Bobby Charles, the Republican nominee for governor of Maine, held a news conference in a Rockland park above the state ferry terminal. He spoke from a podium with a sign attached. The sign said his Democratic opponent, Hannah Pingree, had given $37,458 in taxpayer money to the Island Institute, a Rockland nonprofit, and that the money paid for a climate film made by her husband, filmmaker Jason Mann.

Pingree ran the Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future, the state agency that awarded the grant, from 2019 until May 2025.

There was one problem with the sign. Charles had no proof of what it said.

He'd asked for the records that morning

When a reporter asked whether he had requested the records that would show where the grant money went, Charles said he had, that same morning, before the news conference, the Midcoast Villager reported. He offered no evidence the grant paid Mann for anything. He called on Pingree to release the contracts, invoices, payment records and emails herself.

The Island Institute answered immediately. "That allegation is false," said Sue McKechnie, its chief marketing director. She said the grant from Pingree's former office was for community resiliency, was spent on other projects, and none of it was ever used for Mann's film.

The second accusation fell apart on its own

Charles also questioned whether Mann had been paid out of an $840,000 forgivable state housing loan to the North Haven Sustainable Housing group, which Mann now runs, because around the same time Mann co-directed, produced and edited a film called Our Island Home for the nonprofit.

Then Charles acknowledged that public records don't show whether Mann was paid for that film, how much, by whom, from which account, or whether any of the housing money was involved, the Villager reported. In other words, he raised the accusation in public, then conceded the records don't answer any part of it.

The candidate who'd appoint an inspector general

Charles told reporters he had served as a federal investigator and promised that, as governor, he would appoint an inspector general for every state agency.

So a reporter asked him about a real corruption investigation. Did he think it was wrong that the Trump administration fired the person investigating possible corruption by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins? Charles said he couldn't answer that, because all he knew about it was what he had read in the media.

That's the same evidence standard he had just applied to Pingree, except in her case it was even less: he hadn't seen any records at all. (We've written about the Collins investigation, which ProPublica reported and the FBI dropped after Trump returned to the White House.)

A campaign built on attacks like this

"This attack is completely made up. My husband has never benefited from any grant or program my office had any role in. Not one," Pingree said.

This isn't new for Charles. During the Republican primary, Maine's ethics commission voted to investigate an anonymous website attacking one of his rivals, and his campaign admitted under oath to building two other attack sites against his own primary opponents. Charles also spent years running a lobbying firm that took at least $512,000 from clients that overbilled taxpayers, held no-bid federal contracts or ended up in fraud and bribery cases, which makes him an odd messenger on conflicts of interest.

The facts, in short

At a September 30 news conference, Bobby Charles stood behind a sign claiming Hannah Pingree gave $37,458 in state money to the Island Institute to pay for her husband's climate film. He admitted he had requested the records only that morning and offered no proof, and the Island Institute said the allegation was false. He then conceded public records don't show whether her husband was paid from a separate state housing loan he had also raised.

Source

Midcoast Villager: "Pingree Says GOP Charles Made Up Allegation of Conflict of Interest" (archived copy)