GOP Megadonor Leonard Leo Is Bankrolling a Website on the Warpath Against Somalis |
Special Investigations
Press Freedom Defense Fund
GOP Megadonor Leonard Leo Is Bankrolling a Website on the Warpath Against Somalis
The Maine Wire presents itself as a plucky upstart fighting for the common Mainer, but it’s fueled by powerful right-wing money men.
As the deadly federal immigration crackdown fueled by a racist obsession with Somali people kicked into high gear in Minnesota, a right-wing local news site in Maine had a clear message: Bring the chaos here.
The Maine Wire launched in 2011, and for the next decade most of its output was standard libertarian fare. But as the U.S. right took a hard nativist turn — and amid an infusion of cash from some of the most powerful right-wing money men in the country — the site developed a fixation on Maine’s Somali community, a highly visible immigrant population in a state that’s over 90 percent white.
Amid the runaway success of a right-wing YouTuber’s viral video about “Somali fraud” in Minnesota, the site played an enthusiastic role in selling a similar narrative in Maine, spinning nuggets of truth into overstated claims of massive graft. And they got results.
In January, the Department of Homeland Security launched a surge of federal agents into the state, sweeping up hundreds of migrants while also performing showy raids on Somali-owned businesses linked to people who had been mentioned in the Maine Wire. In February, top federal officials, including Donald Trump himself, called for greater scrutiny of the state’s Medicaid system in language that directly targeted Somalis — a tack that closely followed The Maine Wire’s lead.
Editor-in-chief Steve Robinson, a Maine native who spent years producing shock-jock radio in Boston, came to the publication in 2023. The shift in tone was evident almost immediately. “Maine Governor Wants to Resettle 75,000 Foreign-Born Migrants in Maine by 2029,” Robinson warned in a headline that year. Critics blamed the piece for sparking an anti-immigrant rally by neo-Nazis at the state Capitol a few weeks later.
Robinson and his staffers present the website as a plucky upstart fighting for the common Mainer, but their work is not all driven by lobstermen and loggers. In recent years, The Maine Wire and its parent organization, the libertarian-leaning Maine Policy Institute, benefited from millions of dollars in donations from entities associated with Leonard Leo, the judicial activist widely credited with the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, and Thomas D. Klingenstein, a MAGA megadonor and chair of the ultra-conservative Claremont Institute.
Between 2020 and 2024, the most recent year for which records are available, the Maine Policy Institute saw its annual revenue nearly triple — with a surge in funding from entities linked to Leo and Klingenstein, according to an analysis of tax documents by The Intercept. In 2024, at least $1.2 million of the institute’s $1.9 million budget came from organizations connected to Leo’s dark-money network.
The budget boost came amid a broader push by Leo, Klingenstein, and other conservative bankrollers to inject cash into state-level projects, ensuring their authoritarian, anti-immigrant, and climate-denial efforts have local staying power. (Representatives for Leo and Klingenstein did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)
Matt Gagnon, the Maine Policy Institute’s CEO, declined to comment on how much of that cash goes into the operations of The Maine Wire. But over the course of those years of plenty, its staff has more than doubled to include three reporters, one “digital media correspondent,” and three editors.
In the process, The Maine Wire has carved out a belligerent presence in the state. Its reach is felt especially on social media, where it boasts some 200,000 followers across Facebook and X, as well as 26,000 subscribers to a spinoff on Substack. (Maine’s population hovers at around 1.4 million.) Gagnon credited Robinson for this growth, praising him for pursuing a web-savvy strategy and a voicey style.
“What we’re trying to do with The Maine Wire is not like a Wall Street Journal,” Gagnon told The Intercept. “It’s not ‘Just the facts, ma’am,’ or completely free of bias or opinion. We try to shake through our bias to make sure we’re reporting accurately, obviously, and to make sure that we’re not engaging in tabloid garbage news, but we’re very open about our perspective.”
“You get one Somali on a jury in Minnesota, you think they’re going to convict anybody?”
“You get one Somali on a jury in Minnesota, you think they’re going to convict anybody?”
That perspective is openly hostile to Maine’s Somali community. While discussing the Minnesota fraud scandal on a podcast, for example, Robinson posed, “You get one Somali on a jury in Minnesota, you think they’re going to convict anybody?” — ignoring the dozens of people indicted and convicted by federal prosecutors under President Joe Biden.
This apparent bias leads to similar distortions at home in Maine. Many of The Maine Wire’s claims of fraud rest on existing state audits from years past in which investigators — employed by the state of Maine — found evidence of improper payments. Without producing hard evidence of equivalent examples that have gone unaddressed, the site presents these as the tip of the iceberg, rather than instances of the state actually doing its job to combat fraud.
“The Maine Wire has a way of telling half-truths and then getting Mainers riled up about it,” said Paige Loud, a social worker running for Congress in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.
After an initial interview fell through, Robinson stopped responding to The Intercept’s attempts to reschedule. When contacted with a detailed list of questions prior to publication, he declined to........