BANGOR, Maine – Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles pushed back forcefully against a Bangor Daily News report during an interview with Ric Tyler on Maine’s Morning News on WVOM, Thursday morning, accusing the paper of publishing a politically motivated “hit piece” as the 2026 Republican primary moves closer.
Charles, who served from 2003 to 2005 as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said the report relied on watchdog findings while ignoring the broader context of his work during wartime.
“This is that funny season,” Charles said. “I’m going to call it the season of fake news.”
Charles argued that the story comes as his campaign gains momentum and as political observers begin to see him as a serious contender for the Republican nomination, and potentially the Blaine House.
“When it becomes more and more palpable to those who are seeing the political race here that I am likely to win the nomination and frankly, given my life experience, may win the governorship,” Charles said, “I think it terrifies a lot of these organizations.”
Charles said he anticipated the article and contacted several former colleagues and experts, including former State Department officials, an acting inspector general, military personnel, and individuals involved in police training operations. He said the BDN ignored much of what he provided.
“Of course, they ignored virtually everything that I brought to them,” Charles said.
Charles defended his federal record by laying out what he described as five major accomplishments during his time at the State Department. He said he oversaw global counter-narcotics programs, including efforts tied to Plan Colombia, which he said helped bring down major cartels and reduce heroin and cocaine production.
He also said he improved the readiness of the State Department’s air wing, raising operational readiness from roughly 60 percent to 85 percent.
“No more hangar queens,” Charles said.
Charles said Congress, President George W. Bush, and Secretary of State Colin Powell trusted him to help establish and train the Iraqi police during the war. He said that effort included building a major training operation in Jordan and using C-130 aircraft to move personnel back and forth.
He said the operation trained 35,000 Iraqi police officers.
At the same time, Charles said, he was also asked to help train Afghan police, despite limited infrastructure and major challenges on the ground.
“There was no infrastructure,” Charles said, adding that training sites had to be established in several locations, including Gardez, Kunduz, Kandahar, and Jalalabad.
Charles said the BDN story wrongly treated Afghan illiteracy as a failure of the training program rather than one of the central challenges the program had to overcome.
“The Afghans are illiterate, that’s the problem,” Charles said. “You have to do everything clinically over there.”
Charles also said one of his most important efforts was imposing accountability measures on a sprawling federal operation. He said he called inspectors general into the bureau himself, removed bureaucrats, ended and broke up contracts, pushed competition, cut wasteful programs, recovered money from contractors, and imposed penalties for late delivery.
“I want investigators to rip this place apart so that we know where all the fraud is,” Charles said, comparing his approach at the State Department to what he says is needed in Maine government.
Charles said that kind of aggressive oversight made him enemies inside the bureaucracy.
“If you’re an agent of change, they hate you,” Charles said.
Tyler pressed Charles on whether the watchdog findings applied to his actual tenure from 2003 to 2005. Charles said the BDN pulled from reports spanning a much longer period and suggested the paper blurred the timeline.
“They jumped, they pulled IG reports from over 20 years,” Charles said. “I wasn’t there 20 years.”
Charles said the relevant 2005 report reflected a period of major transition and reform. He argued that inspectors general were gathering input from bureaucrats, including some who disliked his changes, while also identifying areas that still needed improvement.
Tyler then asked whether Charles believed any of the audit criticisms were fair.
Charles said some were, but he framed them as part of the normal process of reforming a large government operation under extraordinary conditions.
“Every business, every government is imperfect,” Charles said. “You need to constantly, you need to be your own harshest critic, and you need to constantly be improving.”
Charles said the watchdog report recognized progress while also identifying additional reforms that still needed to be made.
“The gist of their report was lots of great stuff done, but by the way, while you were trying to bring down the Cali Cartel, while you were training 35,000 police in Iraq and Afghanistan, while you were doing all these reforms, oh by the way, there’s some other things here you could do too,” Charles said.
Tyler also raised one of the most specific issues from the report: $43.8 million in trailers for police trainers in Iraq that reportedly sat unassembled at a Baghdad airport for more than two years.
Charles said that happened after his tenure and argued that the example showed the difficulty of moving equipment during wartime in Iraq.
“That happened after me, Rick,” Charles said.
Charles said moving equipment in Iraq required Defense Department approval and coordination, especially when operating around Baghdad International Airport and the Green Zone. He said the State Department had airframes but limited lift capacity, and the broader operational environment was controlled by the Department of Defense.
“You have to have permission to move everything and anything in Iraq,” Charles said.
Tyler also asked Charles about a memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice that referenced “horror stories” involving the Afghan National Police.
Charles said he was not concerned by the memo, arguing that Rumsfeld often sent such memos and that the relationship between Rumsfeld and Powell was strained.
“We used to call them snowflakes, nasty grams,” Charles said.
Charles said the long-term difficulty of the Afghan police program was rooted in the difficulty of training personnel who could not read and could not be taught through the same curriculum used in other countries.
“The reason that the Afghanistan police program over the years became more difficult is because it is difficult to train people, period, who can’t read,” Charles said.
Asked whether the BDN report would cost him support, Charles said no, as long as voters hear his side of the story.
“No,” Charles said. “As long as we can continue to explain that the BDN is a promoter of fake news.”
Charles said he remains proud of his record, including his work on counter-narcotics, police training, and State Department reforms.
“I am so proud of the work we did,” Charles said.
Charles closed by arguing that his experience handling major federal programs is directly relevant to Maine, where he said the next governor must confront waste, fraud, inefficiency, and weak accountability.
“We literally have to, in the state of Maine, get accountability, fiscal management, outcomes, efficiency, and law enforcement,” Charles said.
