Shenna Bellows Is Not a Victim: Editorial

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is not a victim and she is not oppressed, cry as she may on MSNBC, CNN, or whatever national TV show is the next stop on the Bellows 2026 media tour. Bellows is the oppressor and the aggressor in a conflict designed by progressive activists — and their billionaire financiers — to target not only former President Donald Trump’s constitutional rights, but also the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of Mainers.

Reading from her talking points during her national press tour, Bellows has robotically repeated the laughable claim that she’s merely “doing her duty,” as if this unprecedented decision merely fell in her lap by happenstance. As if. Socialist Ethan Strimling, the chief complainant in the challenge to Trump’s eligibility, began making the case to Bellows that she ought to disenfranchise conservative Mainers more than six months ago. He tweeted her a schizophrenic MoveOn.org-sponsored YouTube rant from Robert B. Reich, the 4’11” alum of the Bill Clinton and Carter administrations, which laid out the left-wing election rigging scheme.

The socialist operative later published an op-ed, in a blog funded by Arabella Advisors, that parroted Reich’s election disinformation. “We all know that Trump is an extremely dangerous white supremacist demagogue,” Strimling inveighed, before declaring the 45th president a “traitor” who “should ever be allowed to take office again.” Five or six years ago, those are the kind of things some New York transient might scream to a trashcan after a throaty rip on a crack pipe. But now they flow from a bust-out socialist pol, to the pages of a Soros-funded blog, and into the office of Maine’s Secretary of State.

Bellows and Strimling have known each other for years and both traffic in the same progressive, dark money-fueled left-wing politics. Are we really to believe there was no coordination between the pair of Trump-hating leftists? It beggars belief. Especially considering Bellows and fellow Democratic insider, Attorney General Aaron Frey, telegraphed as early as August that they were planning a dirty trick.

“Our offices are working together to research and analyze the legal requirements for ballot access, including presidential ballot access,” the legislative appointees said, in a press release.  “Any decisions about ballot access will be made dispassionately at the proper time in accordance with the laws and the Constitution, which will be our sole consideration.”

Sure, Jan…

Yet to assume that Bellows’ constitutionally illiterate decision is merely about rigging Maine’s elections for her left-wing patrons is to miss the broader progressive scheme unfolding before our eyes. From Colorado to Maine, the ballot eligibility lawfare has been engineered to culminate with the U.S. Supreme Court. Even Bellows recognized this at the end of her ghost-written opinion. Even despite her paucity of legal understanding, she knows that SCOTUS is going to reject her ruling and that Trump will be on the ballot. However, the true objective of ginning up left-wing antipathy for the Court will have been served. Whether it’s gang rape hoaxes, wink-wink-nod-nod encouragement of assassination attempts on conservative justices, dark money smear campaigns, or calls to stack the Court, the progressive left has been overt about their attempts to subvert and dominate the remaining truly independent branch of government.

Since taking office, Bellows has made frequent trips to Washington, D.C., including for meetings and photo-ops with President Joe Biden. What other arch progressives might she have met with — and schemed with — in the nation’s capital? Her failed 2014 run for U.S. Senate offers some hints. When Bellows made that ill-fated run, her campaign coffers were filled with donations from wealthy out-of-state progressives. Her campaign manager was Daniel Hildreth, an attendee of the Democracy Alliance‘s 2014 meeting at the Ritz Carlton in Chicago. Although Bellows got electorally curb stomped by Susan Collins, she made inroads with the same billionaire donor class she’s seeking to woo today, most likely in support of a future run for higher office.

Since Bellows’ decision last Thursday, the media coverage has shifted decidedly against her. Even analysts on CNN are savaging her legal arguments, and very few liberal elected officials and commentators — whether in Maine or nationally — have defended her legal arguments, even as they fawn over her supposed bravery. So it’s unsurprising and entirely predictable that Bellows would resort to the time-tested refuge of any progressive politician who finds themselves on the wrong side of public opinion: victimhood.

Bellows is a victim, you see, because she’s gotten nasty messages online. Sadly, politics in the era of the Internet means hate mail is easier to send. Just ask Rep. John Andrews (R-Paris) and Rep. Katrina Smith (R-Palermo), both of whom received threatening messages from disgruntled liberals after calling for Bellows’ impeachment. The Maine State Police have also reported receiving a prank phone call from someone claiming to have burglarized Bellows home. It’s unclear why law enforcement didn’t have a detail stationed at Bellows’ home already, but a subsequent inspection determined the call was, indeed, a false report. The so-called “swatting” was similar to what has happened over the last month with several conservative media figures and elected officials, including U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), and U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Geo.) and Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.).

Bellows, who was not home at the time of the prank phone call, subsequently posted to Facebook a lengthy statement in which she accused the Maine Wire of encouraging violence against her. “The Maine Wire for example has been posting extraordinarily dehumanizing fake images of me,” Bellows said, in reference to a political cartoon of her with a Joseph Stalin mustache. “I know from my previous work that dehumanizing a person is the first step in paving the way for attacks and violence against them,” she said.

Let’s be clear about this: Bellows is falsely implying that the Maine Wire in some way encouraged or condoned some lunatic’s effort to have her murdered by police — which is the real goal of most “swatting” — because we posted a political cartoon. This hysterical, bad-faith, evidence-free accusation is an outrageous and appalling attack on one of the few media outlets in Maine that isn’t acting like Bellows’ handmaiden. We would demand an apology if there was any evidence Bellows had enough character to admit when she’s wrong.

Instead, we’ll demand transparency.

The Maine Wire has filed public records requests with the Secretary of State to shed some light on how the scheme to disenfranchise half of Maine came into being. We’ve asked, under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, for Bellows to provide her communications with Strimling and the other complainants, as well as her communications with the Democratic National Committee, the Democracy Alliance, Arabella Advisors, and the Biden White House.

Gov. Janet Mills and her Democrat cronies have lately taken a dim view of the Freedom of Access Act, preferring to delay, obfuscate, and frustrate basic journalistic inquiry. Many of our simple requests are now well over one-year old. We’re under no illusion that the Secretary will share these records with the public with the haste this matter deserves. However, unlike Bellows’ decision to unilaterally deny Mainers their voting rights, producing these public records, eventually, actually is her duty under the law.