Leigh Giangreco is a journalist based in Washington and a Buffalo native.

He promised to run government like a business and basked in his nouveau riche success. He rode a wave of populism that boosted his fame within the Republican Party. Then he squandered it all when he broke the law on the White House lawn.

About a week after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, the end came for one of his most ardent followers in Congress, New York Rep. Chris Collins. Though the outcome of the president’s own predicament is likely months from a resolution, the rise and fall of Collins, a boastful, head-butting, self-proclaimed political outsider with a knack for making enemies, offers, in some respects, a version of the Trump saga in miniature.


Collins, 69, leveraged his notoriety as the first Republican member of Congress to endorse Trump to hold on to his deep-red district in western New York despite a federal indictment. Then, on Monday, after more than a year of insisting on his innocence, he resigned and pleaded guilty to two felony insider trading charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud and lying to the FBI. His sentencing is scheduled for January and he faces up to five years in federal prison for each count.

“Chris Collins was not coming across as the naturally likable guy you want to have a beer with. He’d be the guy working on your mortgage,” said Jim Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Buffalo. “But the bottom line is that’s not what got him into trouble, and the constituents from the last election were willing to stick with him if the alternative was a Democrat and not an especially strong candidate.”

Collins’ legal woes began in June 2017 with an email he received while attending a picnic for members of Congress and their families at the White House. The CEO of Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biotech company of which Collins was a board member and one of its largest shareholders, told him that a drug designed to combat multiple sclerosis had failed a recent test. Collins was stunned. He immediately relayed the information to his son, Cameron Collins, another prominent investor in Innate. The two spoke for about six minutes at 7:16 p.m.. As it happens, a CBS video, captured around the same time, shows Collins speaking on the phone just steps away from Jared Kushner. The federal indictment states that Collins violated the law by passing nonpublic information to his son so that he could use the information to make timely trades and tip off others. According to Buffalo News, Cameron dumped his shares the next day, saving himself $570,900 in losses, and tipped off others.

Reporters in Buffalo and Washington had been zeroing in on Collins’ murky business ties since early 2017. Collins, then the congressional liaison to Trump’s transition team, and Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, then Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, had both invested in Innate. In 2015 and 2016, Price purchased shares of Innate four times, totaling between $60,000 and $110,000, according to the New York Times. That unusual behavior alerted both Democrats and government ethics groups ahead of Price’s confirmation hearing in January 2017.

Collins criticized national outlets for printing “outright lies” and ripped a page from Trump’s playbook by calling his hometown paper “the fake Buffalo News.” He exploited conservatives’ resentment of the press and went to war with The Buffalo News in his fundraising emails. For those who had watched Collins’ rise in politics, his Trumpian treatment of the press seemed out of character for Collins. Up until the News began to cover Collins’ involvement with Innate, he had a more or less cordial relationship with the paper.

“He was actually very helpful as a source and very accessible until all of this stuff started happening in early 2017,” said Jerry Zremski, the News’ Washington correspondent. “I could get him talking for whatever reason. What other people saw as arrogance, I saw as a refreshing brashness.”

On Aug. 8, 2018, the FBI arrested Collins and charged the congressman with wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy. On Aug. 11, he announced he would suspend his reelection campaign in the wake of his indictment. But just five weeks later, Collins made a dramatic about-face and said he would remain on the ballot. The change confounded western New York Republicans who were already in the process of searching for a replacement. Erie County Republican Chair Nick Langworthy said he felt “a bit like a jilted groom at the altar” after Collins informed him of his decision.

Despite the indictment, Collins squeaked to victory, beating Democratic challenger Nate McMurray by about 1,000 votes. In some rural parts of the district that were news deserts, constituents had no idea the congressman had been indicted, say Zremski and McMurray who both talked with voters. Others knew about the charges but simply refused to vote for a Democrat.

“Among some groups it was a badge of honor to have these legal problems, like the system was out to get him,” McMurray said. “And some people thought, ‘This can’t be true. How can the guy who comes to my gun club be a horrible person?’”

Reelection looked less like a win for Collins himself than a victory for intense partisanship. It also seemed to be a lesson for politicians in the Trump era: You can do whatever you want, even break the law, as long as you align yourself with the president.



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The parallels between Collins and Trump run deeper than their legal troubles, alliances with Tea Party fringes and cries of “fake news.” Long before Trump transformed himself from a real estate mogul to a president, Collins had already marketed himself as an entrepreneur-turned-politician.

When Collins ran for Erie County executive in 2007, he pledged he would run the government like a business. As a native of the Buffalo suburbs, I remember the sigh of relief that prospect brought to many western New Yorkers, particularly Republicans. Collins seemed like the conservative antidote for a county whose fiscal house was in such shambles that it required a state-appointed financial control board. And while he would later make several gaffes in his political career, he boasted a respectable pedigree as a first-time candidate.

“I was impressed with him, he seemed to have a good command of his facts, I thought he was extremely ethical,” said Kevin Hardwick, a former Republican turned Democrat who serves on the Erie County Legislature and interviewed then-candidate Collins for his talk radio show. Collins had emphasized not only his business acumen, but his time as an Eagle Scout, a credential that gave him a 1950s “Father Knows Best” quality.

“Chris Collins as county executive was infinitely more professional than the way the president is running the country,” Hardwick said. “He got a reputation for being aloof or arrogant, but he was not incompetent, and he was always convinced he was doing the right thing.”

Voters had reason to believe that Collins could right the ship in Erie County. Unlike Trump’s failed ventures with casinos, airlines, professional football, steaks and higher education, Collins was a self-made millionaire with a reputation as a tough manager who bought companies and fixed them up.

But they do share a certain set of personality traits.

“Collins is like Trump in that he really has very little patience for anyone in his way,” said Matt Spina, a reporter at The Buffalo News who covered Collins’ tenure as county executive. “In their minds, they cut a fuller jib than someone who had a career in government.”

Collins showed that obstinate side during his tenure as county executive, a job he saw as a CEO position with a legislature as his board of directors, Spina said. Like Trump, Collins clashed with that legislative body and often met them in court.

“He would simply not write the check. He basically would say, ‘If you don’t like it, sue me,’ and they did,” said Geoff Kelly, a reporter in Buffalo who covered Collins for the city’s alt-weekly, Artvoice. “He insisted that only he knew how to fix the problems and only he had the authority to do the things that needed to be done.”

Like Trump, he also never really stepped away from his businesses, despite campaign promises to do otherwise. As he unwound his relationships with several companies before becoming county executive, he remained an unpaid director and lead shareholder of Virionyx, a New Zealand-based biopharmaceutical company now known as Innate. Collins argued that he had stayed on because he had a responsibility to his investors, a cadre of wealthy Buffalonians that included then-Sabres coach Lindy Ruff.

Collins made no friends as Erie County executive. His off-color comment about a lap-dance at New York’s State-of-the-State address in 2010 led New York papers to run headlines such as “Collins’ Foot-in-Mouth Disease” and quips like “Chris Collins: Running his mouth like a business.”

“He had his flaws and was in many ways more Bidenesque than Trumpesque,” Hardwick said. He wasn’t lewd, like Trump at his ‘Access Hollywood’ worst, but Collins could be kind of socially obtuse. I once congratulated him on his son’s engagement, to which he responded by asking if I’d seen the size of the ring.

Collins prided himself on his reputation as a calculating businessman. During one speech, he cited a cliché bastardization of the golden rule: “Remember, he who has the gold makes the rule.” The comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect he believed there was some truth to it.

His fiscal conservatism could curdle into a Scrooge-like miserliness. In 2010, he dealt a blow to working mothers when he decreased child care assistance, a cut that would reverberate into the next county executive’s term. As he searched for ways to trim the county budget, he took aim at small theaters, libraries and cultural organizations in the Buffalo area, slashing operational funding in the 2011 budget for all but 10 of the largest cultural groups in the county.

The move incensed and mobilized artists to get out the vote that fall for Mark Poloncarz, a Democrat who had previously served as Erie County comptroller. While Buffalo is often lampooned by outsiders as a backward, Rust Belt town obsessed with football and chicken wings, it boasts a vibrant cultural community that its citizens hold dear.

“The night Poloncarz wins, I go to his victory party and there’s like a dozen arts leaders in the crowd,” said Tod Kniazuk, who led the Arts Services Initiative, a local advocacy group formed in the wake of Collins’ attack on arts funding. “That advocacy was really powerful. That was something that really galvanized folks and made people realize the power we all had.”

Collins delivered on his promises and they turned out to be his undoing. His defeat in the 2011 county election shocked him. He soon found hope, though, in New York’s 27th, a reliably conservative district that swept around the rural and suburban areas of Buffalo and Rochester. The district had recently flipped to Democratic control following another Republican congressman’s scandal and subsequent resignation, but after it was redrawn it ensured victory for Collins in 2012.

The 27th District is Trump country in miniature. East of Buffalo lies the wealthy suburb of Clarence, Collins’ hometown and the land of McMansions. Farther east, dairy farms dot Genesee and Wyoming counties. Conservative hopefuls vying for Collins’ now-vacated seat fill the local AM radio airwaves with talk about one of the district’s hottest issues: the Second Amendment.

“You take a Norman Rockwell main street, it’s rolling fields, farms, the Great Lakes,” McMurray said. “It’s quintessential America, but it’s quintessential America after years of decline.”



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Collins had entered Congress as a traditional conservative in the model of Mitt Romney, but he began tracking Donald Trump following an encounter with him at an Erie County Republican fundraiser in 2014. Although Collins initially endorsed Jeb Bush for the Republican nomination, he was later persuaded to give Trump a look by Michael Caputo, a Buffalo Republican groomed by longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone. Once Bush’s campaign floundered, Collins made it his mission to be the first member of Congress to endorse Trump.

“Chris was very keen on being the first in the House,” Caputo, a Trump campaign adviser, said. “It’s a position of strength and honor if you are the first. You’re correctly perceived as a brave and staunch defender.”

Collins had already begun cozying up to the Tea Party by that point, but he may have thrown his support behind Trump earlier than other Republicans because he saw a kindred spirit in another businessman.

“Both Collins and Trump eschew the niceties of political life,” Caputo said. “In the end, Chris doesn’t care what you think of him, he’s focused on making policy. But that comes back to haunt you because when you need friends you haven’t made any.

There is a sense of schadenfreude back in western New York today, that a man who had been mean and avaricious finally had his comeuppance. Critics of Collins who had filed complaints against him with the Office of Congressional Ethics in early 2017 characterized his time in Congress as “self-serving” and “profiteering in nature,” according to The Buffalo News. Even if his policies aligned with Republicans, his cold nature never garnered allies in his own party.

“Trump has this persona which has allowed him to develop this base that’s very loyal to him,” Zremski said. “Collins is very different. If you talked to people in western New York, you would find that he did not have a lot of close relationships, he didn’t have that base to draw from.”

But for many, including The Buffalo News’ most dogged reporters, Collins’ story is a tragic one.

Early this week, Zremski wrote that Collins took the guilty plea in an effort to protect his son.

“I think it was a crime of passion,” Zremski said. “He was all in on Innate Therapeutics, he genuinely believed that it was going to cure [MS], that he was going to be a lot richer. So there he is on the White House lawn and it crushes his dream.”

In the heat of the moment, Collins probably didn’t think it through and did what often got him into trouble: He ran his mouth. Only this time, it wasn’t an offhanded comment at a political event but a phone call that broke the law.

“A lot of people accuse Trump of being a narcissist. I don’t think people would accuse Collins of being a narcissist,” Zremski said. “He doesn’t have that prized political possession of a self-censor.”