Milliken considers next steps after October case dismissal

In Q&A, state rep speaks out about dropped electioneering charge

State Rep. Nina Milliken speaking at a conference on criminal justice reform in October.

By Tricia Thomas

BLUE HILL—State representative Nina Milliken (D-Blue Hill) said in a recent interview that she and her attorney are considering whether to pursue civil legal action after a case against her for alleged electioneering was dropped last month.

In a far ranging interview with The Rising Tide, Milliken raised concerns that the case–and the lack of any potential repercussions–“feels antithetical to a functioning democracy to me.”  

Milliken was charged on September 5 with one count of attempting “to influence another person’s decision” within 250 feet of a polling place during municipal elections five months earlier, on April 4. Milliken, in her second term representing Maine’s 16th district, denied the charge, and pleaded “not guilty” to the Class-E misdemeanor charge on September 9. A month later, on October 9, Knox County district attorney Natasha C. Irving ordered the dismissal of the charge, based on “new evidence” provided a day earlier by Milliken’s lawyer, Will Ashe, of Ashe Law Offices in Ellsworth. Irving had taken over the case after Hancock County District Attorney Robert Granger recused himself.

“The evidence in the original Sheriff’s Office report included witnesses who did not hear Rep. Milliken make unlawful statements, and three witnesses who indicated that Rep. Milliken’s statements did violate statute. Attorney Ashe was able to speak with two of the three witnesses who previously indicated Rep. Milliken’s statements violated statute and based on those conversations it is clear that they are not certain they heard specific statements that violate Maine law,” Irving said in a statement on October 9.

“With the new information brought to light by defense counsel in this matter, the only just result is a dismissal of criminal charges,” Irving said.

The Rising Tide had filed a request with the sheriff’s office to review the case’s report under Maine’s freedom of information laws. That request was denied. But a copy of the report obtained by The Rising Tide provides additional details of the investigation.

Hancock County Sheriff Scott Kane ordered the investigation after “several citizens” called the sheriff’s office on election day and over the following weekend with “concerns about possible violations of Maine election laws by Milliken.”

“Available information at the time included names of possible witnesses, Facebook posts by Milliken and an image of Milliken at the Blue Hill town office reportedly taken on election day circulating throughout the community,” Hancock County detective Rick Canarr wrote in the report.

Canarr interviewed both those who reported the alleged misdemeanor and others who were present at town hall during voting, including former town administrator Julie Atwell, former town clerk Sarah Lavallee, and select board members Ellen Best, D. Scott Miller and James Wootten, among others. Two of the 15 witnesses interviewed by Canarr were candidates for two open seats on the Blue Hill select board.

As part of his investigation, Canarr also examined photos of Milliken taken by someone in the town hall lobby and emails between select board members about the alleged incident.

While Milliken, a Blue Hill resident, said she was at town hall for about an hour on the morning of April 4 to support a write-in candidate running for the select board, she denied that she violated election laws and maintained that she kept her comments to voters within the bounds of the law. Milliken also said that she texted Maine secretary of state Shenna Bellows, who oversees state elections, about whether her statements that morning were legal, and Bellows affirmed that they were.

According to news reports, the state attorney general’s office, which investigates election-related crimes, could provide no records on previous prosecutions of the misdemeanor.

Now, six weeks after the case’s dismissal, Milliken said she still feels that the investigation and pursuit of her prosecution were politically motivated.

Milliken, who is in her second legislative term representing the towns of Blue Hill, Brooksville, Castine, Sedgwick, Surry and Trenton, also serves on the state house’s Criminal Justice, Public Safety and House Elections committees. She has been a vocal supporter of reparative and equitable criminal justice initiatives and a critic of law enforcement overreach. Her social media comments on such issues have elicited rebukes from both Kane and district attorney Bob Granger, as well as other law enforcement. Recently, both Kane and Granger called for Milliken to step down from the Hancock County Budget Advisory Committee, saying they doubted she’d be objective when voting on their proposed departmental budgets for 2026.

“I feel it’s a conflict of interest,” Kane said in a telephone interview on October 7. “If someone has a case pending, they should recuse themselves.”

State Rep. Nina Milliken.

Kane has declined several requests by The Rising Tide to discuss the charges brought against Milliken. Irving also has made no comment, aside from her October 9 statement. In addition, a request to access public documents related to the case under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) was denied, citing an ongoing investigation. A separate request for documents concerning the time and money spent to date on the investigation is pending.

Granger said in a telephone interview on November 21 that he has not seen the investigation report or had any conversations about it with any of those involved. Granger recused himself from the case last spring, citing a conflict of interest. Maine law prevents him from having any knowledge of a case from which he’s recused himself, Granger said.

According to Maine’s Board of Overseers for the Bar, Rule 3.8, “Special Responsibilities of a Prosecutor,” states: 

“The prosecutor shall: (a) refrain from prosecuting a criminal or juvenile charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause; (b) make timely disclosure in a criminal or juvenile case to counsel for the defendant, or to a defendant without counsel, of the existence of evidence or information known to the prosecutor after diligent inquiry and within the prosecutor’s possession or control, that tends to negate the guilt of the accused, mitigate the degree of the offense, or reduce the punishment; (c) refrain from conducting a civil, juvenile, or criminal case against any person whom the prosecutor knows that the prosecutor represents or has represented as a client; (d) refrain from conducting a civil, juvenile, or criminal case against any person relative to a matter in which the prosecutor knows that the prosecutor represents or has represented a complaining witness.”

“I’m completely firewalled,” Granger said.

Since the dismissal of the case, Milliken has continued her legislative work. She said she’s proud of what she’s been able to accomplish despite the case’s personal toll, including crafting successful legislation to help save the Toddy Pond and Alamoosook Lake dams and prevent future dam abandonments, and her ongoing work to improve the state’s criminal justice system. But Milliken also said that the experience has been highly stressful for her and her family, and that she’s spent “thousands of dollars” defending herself.

In two interviews with The Rising Tide over the last two months, Milliken talked candidly about the case, her experience and its effects on her and her family as she plans to run for reelection in 2026.

Let’s start with election day in Blue Hill on April 4. Why were you at town hall?

“I am friends with [elected select board member] Amanda Woog and supported her campaign for the select board…The law specifically states that one representative of the candidate can be at the polls and greet voters.”

Did you think your presence at town hall was problematic at the time?

“I have text messages from Shenna Bellows. I spoke with our campaign staff for the House Democratic Campaign Committee about what I could and couldn’t say going into that morning. I dotted my I’s and crossed all my T’s to make sure that I was following and in complete compliance with the law.”

“I also had read the statute, which says what the prohibitions are. It’s very explicit about what you can and cannot do.”

You’ve said you were at the Blue Hill town hall for about an hour. Did anyone approach you, or question or challenge you, about being there?

“No, nobody. I talked to Scott Miller, who’s on the select board, for several minutes about the [Toddy Pond and Alamoosook Lake] dams because I was working on a bill about the dams. He never once, that I recall, said anything like, ‘I don’t think you’re allowed to be doing this.’ ”

Did anyone ask you to leave?

“No…I left at exactly 11 o’clock. I walked across the street, got in my car, and hopped on [a Zoom] call. At that time, in the spring, I was doing a weekly Zoom every Friday morning with the Maine State Prison branch of the NAACP.”

Were you surprised by the investigation or by the subsequent charge?

“[The Sheriff’s office] had been calling me every week or so, starting in April when they were investigating it. Scott Kane actually came to Augusta and pulled me out of committee one day and told me that I needed to call his investigator.”

“Then, on September 3, a cop came by my house. I wasn’t home…but I wondered what it was about.”

“As soon as I got the charge, I looked it up, [and discovered] that it had never been charged before. Not only did I not break the law, but this was the first time in this state’s history that a charge has ever been filed.”

You pleaded ‘not guilty’ on September 9. Did you expect or want the case to go to trial?

“I expected that, ultimately, the case would be dismissed. When I saw the police report, I thought that the state would be idiotic to seat a jury for it. If you put a FOAA request [under freedom of information laws] in for the police report, you will see that there was almost no evidence.”

Do you have any idea how much time and money has been spent on the case?

“I have a lawyer that’s trying to FOAA that.”

“Scott Kane himself and the detective both spent time investigating this. It would be interesting for me to see how much time Scott Kane personally spends on criminal cases. My sense is that he supervises but doesn’t actually conduct investigations often himself, but he was heavily involved in this one.”

“I mean it was days. They came to Blue Hill multiple times. They had people go to meet them at the sheriff's office. Scott Kane came to Augusta. To be fair, I serve on the criminal justice committee, and it’s not uncommon for sheriffs to come into our committee room…What was unusual was that he pulled me out to tell me that I needed to call his investigator. He took a specific action at my place of work to pull me out of work and tell me that I needed to reach out to his investigator who was trying to get ahold of me. I asked him in that moment, ‘What’s this about?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I can’t get into that right now, but you need to call him.”

“The taxpayers get to pay for all of that. They get to pay for him to go down there and do that. They get to pay for the prosecutors’ time to do their jobs too.”

How have your constituents responded to this case?

“A lot of people, even before it was dismissed, were coming to me and saying, ‘there’s something fishy here…Not everyone feels that way, of course, but I feel very supported by most people in my community.”

You’ve said that you feel the pursuit and handling of this case was politically motivated. How so?

“Almost everyone in that police report is a Republican…but, to whatever extent I can give them some latitude, I think most of them legitimately thought they were reporting a crime, and it would have been incumbent on the sheriff to read that six-sentence statute [covering political activities]. The enormous amount of resources that were dumped into investigating a crime that’s basically in the same class of crime as a vehicle registration issue is insane to me.”

“It feels important to me that there be consequences for things like this. They shouldn’t be allowed to do this to people that they politically disagree with. Frankly, in the issue with the sheriff, I think there’s a direct correlation between my work in criminal justice reform and criminal legal reform and his willingness to go after me so hard.”

“I sit on the criminal justice and public safety committee, which is the primary mechanism for citizen oversight of police in this state. I am almost certainly the most critical of our criminal justice system from the legislature, if not one of the top three most critical people of our criminal justice system from my seat in the legislature. Many people in my work realm have said, ‘This is retaliatory.’ ”

How much money and time did you spend on the case? 

“I’ve spent thousands of dollars on my defense. I didn’t spend an exorbitant amount of time, other than communicating with my lawyer and other folks, but the enormous stress and anxiety that this created for me felt more cumbersome than the amount of time it took. And, it came at a time when I already was experiencing an enormous amount of stress in my personal life.”

What was your biggest stressor?

“Safety—mine and my family’s. [Conservative political activist] Charlie Kirk was killed not long after I was charged, and it made me very scared for my family’s safety and for my safety, because I was in the news all the time. The way I was being talked about on Facebook also was really harmful, and it felt very clear to me that I didn’t have the police on my side. So, if anything happened, if anyone came to my house to try to harm me or my family, it made me very nervous about what the police response to that would look like. The money [I’ve spent] is tough. The time is less significant, but the amount of stress and anxiety it provoked in me was very impactful.”

“I also want to say that I’m in recovery. I’ve been very vocal about that, but when I had to call my mom and tell her I was charged with a crime, that was awful for me. There’s always going to be this thing in the back of my mom’s head that I could fall off the wagon or that we could go back to how it was. I scared the [expletive] out of her for a very long time. But I’ve also done a lot of work in the community to improve my reputation, and it felt like this charge was very damaging to that.”

It’s now about six weeks since the case has been dismissed. What are your next steps, and do they include any legal action?

“I am looking into the possibility of suing, but it’s very difficult to sue the police. We provide them [with] great immunity, so that’s going to be a tricky thing.”

Do you plan to run for reelection?

“I do plan on running again.”

You said when we talked in October that you felt the case could impact your potential electability. Do you still feel that way?

“I don’t know that it will impact my electability…I think I will be elected, or I’m hopeful, of course.”

Has this experience informed your work in criminal justice?

“It’s given me the same perspective I’ve always had. When I first talked with Will Ashe, my defense attorney, one of the first things he said to me was, ‘If you walk in on arraignment day and you plead guilty, you’re going to pay $200 in fines. That’s going to be your punishment. And, if you hire me, my retainer is $4,000.’ So, all that said to me is, ‘If you’re poor, you’re [expletive.] You’re going to be convicted of a crime. If you have the resources, you’ll have access to a defense attorney.’  So, you have to have money to defend yourself in this state. Fortunately, I have a lot of support. I was able to pay [Ashe], thank God, but you can see why people who don’t have access to resources will just plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit.”

“We have a deeply harmful criminal justice system. This situation showed me how problematic it can be.”

Has this experience changed how you’ll work with law enforcement?

“In my work, I’m critical of cops—not cops individually. I know some really wonderful policemen and women, but the fact that this sheriff's office and this prosecutor's office can do this, and there’s no, or very minimal, opportunity for any kind of repercussion for them feels antithetical to a functional democracy to me.”

“My job is police oversight. They didn’t like how I was doing my job, that I’m effective at it and that it was my primary focus. They didn’t like my legislative and policy work on policing systems to make them safer and better for everybody. So, they charged me with a crime. That’s scary. That should be scary to people, and not just me because I was the one charged. That should be scary to everybody in the state.”