Sam Patten has worked for Maine’s last three Republican senators, including Susan Collins’ first electoral campaigns, is a former managing editor of The Maine Wire and is the author of “Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a Foreign Agent.”

Despite the four-to five-point bump betting markets have given Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Troy Jackson since the “blockbuster” scandal about incumbent Sen. Susan Collins was pumped by national and state media earlier this week, it will probably amount to very little in the poll that counts the month after next. 

When Collins was first elected to the Senate in 1996, I was her campaign’s finance director and coordinated fundraising efforts. While that was a long time ago, it did afford me some perspective on how the senator approaches campaign finance. The latest news doesn’t square with my ground-level understanding of her.

On its surface, Tuesday’s ProPublica story about alleged corruption involving Collins and her campaign has all the hallmarks of a game-changer: a pay-for-play contributions for contracts scandal, a cover-up involving the nefarious Cleta Mitchell and a claim that but for President Trump Collins would have been indicted? It’s the kind of perfect storm those seeking to oust her dream of.

Another — less pleasant — experience of mine involves having been charged with a crime by the U.S. Department of Justice. (In 2018, I pleaded guilty to failure to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine in the since much-debated, and largely discredited, “Russiagate” probe). This gave me some insight into how that process works.

Prosecutorial discretion accounts for much more than we really understand. With a small fry like me, it can be a matter of simply accumulating scalps. But with a big fish like a powerful U.S. senator, it’s different. To proceed with an indictment, all the ducks must be in a row.

Think of the recent case of New Jersey’s Bob Menendez. The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was literally accepting gold bars as payment from a foreign government for acting on its behalf. But it was a decades-long campaign by the Justice Department to nail him, following an earlier acquittal on other corruption charges.

Because he slipped through their fingers before, the feds were committed to eventually getting Menendez, who they knew was a crook. Interestingly, they didn’t charge him with FARA — (my crime) because it is such a rarely prosecuted law they knew he could beat it on appeal — but conspiracy to violate FARA.

Then there is Alaska’s Ted Stevens who, like Collins, chaired the Appropriations Committee for some time. Stevens, it could be argued, built Alaska; the man was a giant. One partisan prosecutor went after him for illegally accepting a barbecue grill and the renovation of his deck by a contractor.

While Stevens defeated the charge at trial, it was too late — he’d been smeared out of the Senate (the prosecutor, who’d also botched Roman Polanski’s extradition, later hung himself).

Collins’ case differs from both of these because the DOJ declined to indict her following a two-year investigation. Even “Biden’s Justice Department” couldn’t muster a case, her staff have said in recent days, in a tacit acceptance of the weaponization of the courts that played such a large role in Trump’s 2024 reelection.

That Trump came into office the following year and began vindictively firing prosecutors is incidental, however bad it might look. It only appears to tie her to him.

What the ProPublica story demands of us is that we become the prosecutors and with our vote exercise our own discretion. Feels good, but is it honest?

Also, none of this is new. The Navatek/Martin Kao story has been around for seven years and was first reported in Maine in 2021. Kao now sits in federal prison on unrelated fraud charges. While I may take issue with Collins’ office blithely dismissing the man as felon and a liar after having once worked with him, one must remember we’re talking about politicians here.

Having been convicted on unrelated charges, Kao has a strong motivation to lessen his seven-year prison sentence. I see little point in calling him names, but also note that the FBI had listened to his story for years and declined to then name Collins or her team as targets. That is consequential, regardless of which prosecutors got fired or quit last year.

Those pumping this story — including Jackson — hope that it will put a punctuation point on the “enough is enough” argument when it comes to granting Collins yet another term. But experience has also taught me that voters are smarter than political consultants often assume.

Does it smell cooked?

Taken at face value, the “scandal” boils down to Collins’ willingness to believe some dude from Hawaii who promises to create jobs in Maine. The voters who matter in this election will be the ones who understand that lack of well-paying, diversified jobs in our state is a big part of the problem non-retirees face every day.

In the late 1990s, New York voters looked past Alfonse D’Amato’s unsavory underworld connections because he managed to get the Empire State’s potholes filled. Will the same hold true for Collins next month? Guess we’ll see.