On February 13, 2021, Susan Collins was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. It is the vote her allies reach for whenever anyone calls her a rubber stamp.

In June of this year, her campaign named Wayne Erkkinen its town chair in Greenville. The Anti-Defamation League had already identified Erkkinen, four years earlier, as one of the Mainers on the Oath Keepers' membership rolls.

Who Erkkinen is, and how he was identified

Erkkinen, 81, is a Piscataquis County commissioner. As town chair, he is responsible for grassroots organizing and voter outreach in Greenville — the kind of job that puts a person in front of neighbors, at doors, on phones, for a campaign that is fighting for its life.

His name surfaced in 2022. The Portland Press Herald reported that the ADL's Center on Extremism had gone through a five-gigabyte cache of Oath Keepers emails, chat logs, and membership data leaked by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets. The rolls held 38,000 names. Nationwide, the ADL found more than 370 members of law enforcement, more than 100 military members, and more than 80 elected officials. In Maine, 215 people had at some point been paying members.

The ADL released Erkkinen's name at the Press Herald's request, along with that of a Gorham town councilor. It withheld the names of a Maine police officer and two first-responders it had also identified, saying the report was not meant to "unmask" rank-and-file personnel.

Erkkinen did not respond to a phone message left at his home in Greenville Junction in 2022.

What the group was

This matters because of what the Oath Keepers actually did.

Its founder, Stewart Rhodes, was indicted for seditious conspiracy against the United States for his role in planning the January 6 assault. Seventeen members faced federal charges over the attack. Rhodes was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison in May 2023 — the longest sentence handed down over January 6, and the first to carry a terrorism enhancement. Trump released him on his first day back in office.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks violent extremist groups, describes the Oath Keepers as an anti-government organization built on the belief that federal authorities are conspiring to impose martial law, confiscate weapons, and herd opponents into camps.

That is the group. Not a veterans' club with a bad news cycle.

What Erkkinen says now

Asked about it this week, Erkkinen told the Daily Beast he joined in 2010 thinking it was an organization for law enforcement and military veterans who had sworn to defend the Constitution. He said he quit "years ago," before January 6, because he didn't want to be part of something violent.

"It wasn't what I thought it would be," he said.

Take him at his word. It changes nothing about the decision Collins' campaign made. A national organization had published his name in 2022, a Maine newspaper had printed it, and four years later her campaign handed him a job running voter outreach.

Collins' campaign, per the Daily Beast, argued that it cannot be expected to keep tabs on every grassroots volunteer on its books.

The vetting she says she does

This is a campaign that has spent 2026 telling Mainers that Collins is different from the rest of her party — a senator, in the Daily Beast's words, "who claims to be right in the weeds of Maine's issues." She has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997.

A town chair is not a stranger who signed up on a website. It is a named appointment the campaign announces. Someone chose him and someone published it.

And the January 6 vote is the whole argument for her independence. If that vote meant what she says it meant, the people who show up in her name in Maine towns are exactly where it should be visible.

The pattern this fits

It is not the first time this year that what Collins does has diverged from what her January 6 vote is supposed to prove. On July 28 she voted to confirm a director of national intelligence who would not say Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Her deciding-vote record tells a related story. Collins has cast 200 deciding votes in the Senate. The Maine Democratic Party counts 19 of them as confirming Trump nominees, and none as stopping one.

The short version

Susan Collins voted to convict Trump for inciting January 6. In June 2026, her Senate campaign named as its Greenville town chair a man the Anti-Defamation League had publicly identified in 2022 as one of 215 Mainers on the Oath Keepers' leaked membership rolls — the group whose founder was convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning that same attack. Her campaign's answer is that it cannot keep tabs on every volunteer.

Source

Thomas Kika, "Collins Re-Election Bid Stumbles Over 'Oath Keeper' On Campaign Staff", The National Memo, September 2, 2026, reporting on the Daily Beast's story; and Matt Byrne, "Gorham councilor, Piscataquis County commissioner appear on Oath Keepers member lists", Portland Press Herald, September 7, 2022. Photo: official Senate portrait.