Dem Senate candidate calls to 'shut the White House down,' impeach 2 Supreme Court justices
Graham Platner, the frontrunner for the Maine Senate Democratic primary, said he would push to subpoena a wide swath of White House officials and to impeach Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito during a recent interview with NBC News.
"I want to shut the White House down," he told NBC in an interview released Wednesday. "I want us to, for the next two years, be dragging every single person in the White House, every single person in all these agencies that have been conducting themselves in illegal and unconstitutional ways. They need to be dragged by subpoena in front of Senate committees over and over and over again."
Among those he claimed were committing crimes or acting unconstitutionally were officials involved in deploying U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to U.S. cities and those involved in bombing campaigns in the Caribbean against alleged narcoterrorists, operations he referred to as "murder."
He also said there is a "compelling case" to impeach both Thomas and Alito.
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"The relationship between Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow is not hard to see as clearly corrupt, and Justice Thomas doesn’t even recuse himself from cases that impact Crow’s businesses," he said. "These are absolutely reasons for removal."
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House, the Supreme Court and the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, for comment.
In 2024, Justice Thomas amended his 2019 financial disclosure after a ProPublica report revealed that he had received gifts in the form of travel and lodging from GOP mega-donor Harlan Crow. The report revealed that Crow had paid for lodging and transit on his private plane for trips to Bali, Indonesia and Sonoma County, California.
Thomas claimed he originally omitted the meals and rides from reports because he believed they fell under the personal hospitality exemption. The exemption stems from Judicial Conference guidance which states that "personal hospitality" from a friend does not need to be reported if the friend did not have business before the court.
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"Harlan and Kathy Crow are among our dearest friends, and we have been friends for over twenty-five years," Thomas said in a statement at the time.
"As friends do, we have joined them on a number of family trips during the more than quarter century we have known them. Early in my tenure at the Court, I sought guidance from my colleagues and others in the judiciary, and was advised that this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable," he wrote.
The report also revealed that Thomas sold a trio of Savannah, Georgia, homes to Crow for $133,000 in 2014. Thomas said he did not list the sales because, after spending over $50,000 on renovations to one of the homes, the sale amounted to a financial loss.
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Platner did not specify in the interview what he believed Alito should be impeached for.
In 2023, Alito defended himself from criticisms over a 2009 trip he took on a private jet paid for by billionaire Paul Singer. Alito did not disclose the trip or recuse himself from future business Singer had in front of the Supreme Court. Alito argued that the trip "would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially."
Thomas is not the only Supreme Court Justice to amend his financial disclosures.
In 2021, Justice Sonia Sotomayor updated her 2016 disclosure to include six trips to public universities paid for by the schools that she'd previously omitted. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also updated a decade's worth of disclosures during her nomination process. Omissions included her husband’s consulting income, her teacher's salary and a gift she incurred from giving a speech.
Fox News Digital asked Platner's campaign if he would support impeaching other justices, including Sotomayor and Jackson, but did not immediately receive a response.
Platner also echoed an increasingly popular view on the left that the Democrats should support an expansion of the Supreme Court, telling NBC that he's "definitely open to doing more, including to adding seats."
While stating he supported the judicial impeachments, Platner added that the Democrats should not waste their time on impeaching President Donald Trump.
"If we don’t have the votes in the Senate to convict, I don’t think we should waste our time with it," he told the outlet.
He also said that he does not want to see Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., repeat his term as the Democrats' leader in the Senate. Schumer has publicly backed Maine Gov. Janet Mills, Platner's primary opponent.
Platner floated four names to replace Schumer: Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.; Mark Kelly, D-Ariz.; Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii; and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.
Platner, a self-described progressive, is backed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. He's a combat veteran who did three tours in Iraq as a Marine and a tour in Afghanistan with the Maine National Guard.
He's currently leading in the polls against both his Democratic primary opponent Mills and the incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins. But his campaign has not been entirely smooth sailing.
He's had to confront numerous controversies in recent months, most notably perhaps the revelation that he once sported a large chest tattoo that resembled Nazi iconography.
In October, Platner covered up a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest that strongly resembled the Totenkopf symbol used by Hitler’s SS forces. Platner claimed he got the tattoo as a veteran while drunk in Croatia and didn't know it was akin to the Nazi symbol until media reports in 2024. He says he plans to remove it.
Platner also fessed up to running an edgy Reddit account that reportedly disparaged Black people and police and praised a raid executed by Hamas terrorists.