Governor Paul LePage’s campaign strategist and spokesperson, Brent Littlefield, appeared on the TV show 207 last night to respond to my book, As Maine Went, which I discussed on the program a few weeks ago.

It was a strange spectacle. During the seven-minute segment, Littlefield failed to refute a single fact from the book and repeatedly refused to answer even basic questions about the governor’s lengthy and frequent meetings with a group of Sovereign Citizen conspiracy theorists in which LePage discussed a number of the men’s conspiracy theories, as well as their desire to arrest and try his political opponents for treason.

“I don’t know these people. I wasn’t in any of these meetings. I haven’t discussed these meetings with the governor,” said Littlefield. He plead a similar ignorance each of the four times host Rob Caldwell tried to nail him down on why LePage met with the men and what they discussed.

Littlefield’s only critique was not of the book, but of me personally. He repeatedly tried to steer the conversation back to my beliefs and opposition to the governor. As Caldwell noted, the fact that I’m progressive isn’t exactly a secret, nor is it particularly relevant to the facts of LePage’s meetings.

“There’s no question that Mike Tipping is a liberal. Everyone in Maine political circles knows that. He acknowledges that. There’s no question about that, but these are serious issues. Why would Paul LePage meet on numerous occasions for meetings that lasted up to three hours, according to the book, with people who believed, for instance, that UN has a plan to depopulate the northern tier of Maine. Why would Paul LePage spend hours with these people?” asked Caldwell.

“I’ll tell you again that I was not there, I was not a part of these meetings,” said Littlefield.

“But you speak for the governor. We asked the governor to come on this program and he was not made available. You were the one who was made available,” said Caldwell.

Although Littlefield claims that he hasn’t discussed the meetings with the governor, he has apparently done some research into the Constitutional Coalition. Twice in the conversation he brought up the fact that one of the members of the group had engaged in environmental activism in the 1980s.

Littlefield is obviously concerned enough about the facts of these meetings to appear on TV to address them (and then fail to do so) as well as to do significant research on the individuals who met with the governor. The fact then that he claims never to have asked his boss about them raises some interesting questions. Perhaps there are things he doesn’t want to know.