AUGUSTA, Maine — Former President Donald Trump’s legal team asked a judge this week to consider Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ relationships with two of the former elected officials who successfully challenged Trump’s eligibility here.
But Trump’s motion, dated Monday and posted online Wednesday, is shoddy, citing dated information from LinkedIn and Wikipedia along with tax returns and news reports to falsely claim Bellows and former Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling worked at a nonprofit at the same time.
In reality, Bellows replaced Strimling in late 2015 as executive director of LearningWorks, a nonprofit offering education programs for children and adults in southern Maine. She served in that interim role until 2016, when she was elected to the Maine Senate.
A December 2015 statement from the LearningWorks board announced Bellows as the interim executive director and said Strimling, a progressive Democrat who stepped down at that time to become Portland’s mayor, left “a lasting legacy” at the nonprofit.
The filing marked a stark, 11th-hour escalation of the Trump team’s attacks on Bellows after her Dec. 28 ruling that Trump was ineligible for the Republican primary ballot under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Superior Court Justice Michaela Murphy will rule by next week on Trump’s appeal of the decision.
That is unlikely to be the final word on the matter. Trump has also appealed a similar Colorado Supreme Court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear arguments Feb. 8. It has a conservative majority cemented by Trump’s nominees and could issue a decision also overturning the Bellows decision.
The supplemental motion from Trump attorneys Bruce Hepler, Benjamin Hartwell, Scott Gessler and Gary Lawkowski asked Murphy to accept the information in part because it is “highly relevant” to their claim Bellows was a “biased adjudicator.”
While Bellows has shot back that state law required Trump’s team to ask for her recusal before a December hearing on the ballot challenge, this week’s motion from the former president’s side said they were “unable to unearth” the information on Bellows’ relationships before the hearing.
The motion also cited a tweet featuring a Jan. 2 CNN interview in which former state Sen. Tom Saviello of Wilton, another one of the challengers, knew Bellows “very well personally.” While they said it is “unclear” exactly how Saviello knows Bellows, his statement adds to “the appearance of impropriety.”
Saviello said Thursday that his connection to Bellows is simple: They overlapped in the Maine Senate. He was previously a Democrat and independent but served as a Republican senator from 2010 to 2018. Bellows served in the body from 2016 to 2020, when the Legislature elected her secretary of state.
A reply that Attorney General Aaron Frey’s office filed Wednesday on behalf of Bellows said the assertion she knows Strimling and Saviello is “simply not evidence of bias.” It noted Strimling’s LinkedIn page cited by Trump’s attorneys has an outdated “CEO at Learningworks” title.
The reply also mentioned an often-uttered line by U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, that the state “is just one big small town connected by long roads” to argue most public officials in the state either know or have worked closely with one another.
The state’s reply rejected Trump’s argument that Bellows predetermined the outcome of the challenges to his eligibility by previously saying Trump should have been impeached for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riots.
Bellows tweeted in February 2021 that although the U.S. Senate fell short of removing Trump from office, the 57 senators who voted to impeach represented “an indictment” and added “the Jan. 6 insurrection was an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election.”
Bellows’ brief argued “insurrection” was “common parlance” used in 2021 by both Democrats and Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and that past statements do not relate to her application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Bellows has said she followed Maine law in considering three challenges to Trump’s eligibility and evidence both sides presented at a hearing before determining in a Dec. 28 ruling that Trump incited the 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol, calling the attack “violent enough, potent enough and long enough to constitute an insurrection.”
