AUGUSTA, Maine - For the first time since being accused of orchestrating the firing of Democratic House Speaker Mark Eves as president of the Good Will-Hinckley school in Fairfield, Gov. Paul LePage is speaking out about it, and defending his actions.
Last week, after Eves accused LePage of getting him fired from a job he had yet to start, LePage was reluctant to comment on the allegation. "I can’t talk about it because I have been advised by my attorneys to stay away from that," LePage told MPBN News. "Let him do what he’s got to do. He is not the only one that has a right to the First Amendment."
But now LePage is acknowledging that he did intervene, and he's also defending his action to prevent Eves from getting the job because of Eves’ long-standing opposition to charter schools. Good Will-Hinckley operates a charter school on its campus.
"I don’t understand about a threat - here is a person who, for five years, has been going against charter schools," LePage says. "He voted against them, he spoke harshly against them, and now he is concerned? I don’t know what he is talking about. I am a pro-charter school advocate and he is an opponent."
Eves says the principal goal of Good Will-Hinckley has been to help children at risk, something that has long been the focus of his professional career. He says the board of Good Will-Hinckley agreed that he was the best choice to run the school - until LePage intervened and threatened to pull $500,000 in state funding for the school if Eves was kept as president.
LePage does not deny he withheld state funds. "Yeah, I did. If I could I would, absolutely why wouldn’t I?" he says. "Tell me why l wouldn’t take taxpayer money to prevent somebody from going into a school and destroying it because his heart is not in doing the right thing for Maine people."
Eves says what LePage did was to use his position as governor to keep state funds from a private non-profit and punish a political opponent along the way. He says it bodes ill for state government as a whole.
"Our three branches of government are equal. They exist together," Eves says. "That is being threatened right now if this goes unchecked. So, I don’t know what else to call it other than blackmail. That’s certainly what it feels like to me."
LePage rejects the use of the word blackmail to characterize what he did. "Go read the definition. Please read the definition of blackmail," he says. "I don’t gain anything out of it and neither does he, so there is nobody gaining anything. So I think you are misusing the word, and that is coming from a Frenchman."
But the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary along with several others say personal gain is not a requirement for the definition. They say to force someone to do something by using threats is one definition of blackmail. Eves says it sure seems like blackmail to him.
"I don’t know if anybody gained anything but I know I lost a job, and I know I lost a job because the governor got in the way and used the machinery of government - taxpayer dollars - to prevent that from happening," Eves says.
When asked if he will take legal action against LePage, Eves will only say everything is under consideration.
