WASHINGTON — The top spokesman for Mayor Mamdani raked in more than $50,000 for political consulting work on Maine Senate Democratic candidate Graham Platner’s campaign right up until he started at City Hall in January.
Press secretary Joe Calvello quit the consulting gig before getting the job with NYC — for which he’s paid a cool $210,000 a year, according to the mayor’s office.
He’s yet another Mamdani insider with close ties to the embattled left-wing oysterman — who was revealed to have been sexting up to a dozen women while married.
Also cross-pollinating between the camps is lefty kingmaker Morris Katz — who faced backlash for allegedly browbeating the ex-staffer who blew the whistle on Platner and tried to kill the sexting story.
The Calvello gig was wrapped up in a Wyoming-based LLC — which have been used in the past to obscure shady deals.
Graham for Maine paid a company registered to Joe Calvello a total of $50,036.07 for “communications consulting” between Oct. 1, 2025, and Jan. 9, 2026, according to federal campaign finance filings, with the final $10,000 payment arriving nine days after the mayor was sworn in.
The mayor’s office noted that Calvello’s start date was Jan. 13, meaning he didn’t have to declare a conflict of interest or obtain a waiver to finish his work for Platner — as well as other Democratic candidates — before joining the Mamdani administration.
Calvello has shared statements from Platner responding to the Trump administration’s capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro as recently as Jan. 3 — and spent the preceding year promoting the candidate’s appearances at rallies, town halls and other events.
More than 6,500 people turned out for an event Platner did with socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in September, and the Senate hopeful returned to his old stomping grounds in Washington, DC, to tend bar at the Tune Inn 10 days later — with Calvello by his side.
Calvello’s firm, Common Pheasant Consulting LLC, was incorporated in Cheyenne, Wyo., in May 2025 and received a total of more than $68,500 from Democratic campaigns between August of that year and the following January.
LLCs in the state don’t have to disclose other owners or members, making it difficult to determine who receives additional money for political campaign work besides the registered agent.
As of May 2, Common Pheasant had also received a notice that it was tax delinquent, according to Wyoming business records.
Earlier this year, a Big Apple watchdog group uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars that had flowed from the ex-Mayor Eric Adams campaign to Wyoming-based LLCs and urged the city’s Campaign Finance Board to investigate, NBC News 4 reported, noting it was “incredibly suspicious.”
Calvello did not respond to a request for comment about Platner’s recent sexual messaging scandal.
The Democratic flack had previously served as communications director for Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) after his successful 2022 campaign against Dr. Mehmet Oz in the Keystone State — and as a strategic adviser to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D).
Over the weekend, a former Platner aide told The New York Times that the candidate had exchanged steamy texts with at least six women — and that the Maine Democrat’s wife had come forward with the allegations last year.
The candidate’s former political director Genevieve McDonald — who left the Democrat’s campaign last October — said Platner’s wife Amy Gertner came clean about his “sexting” in August 2025, the month before she was put on the campaign payroll, receiving more than $28,750 through March of this year.
Platner and Gertner dismissed The Times and Wall Street Journal reports as “gossip,” but they admitted to having sought marriage counseling and defended their union as “very loving and very happy” — despite the setback.
Platner also reportedly as of this week still maintained a profile, “Phustle0331,” on Kik, a chat app for hookups, that displayed a bathroom mirror selfie with himself wrapped just in a towel, The Daily Wire reported.
“Phustle! Have you seen Phustle? … We didn’t match up on Kik,” Fetterman mocked Platner using his purported Kik account profile name on Tuesday when speaking with reporters.
“I think you shouldn’t send sexually explicit texts or d—k pics, or whatever he sends to all these women on Kik,” Fetterman said, according to NOTUS.
“That was like less than a year ago. I mean, what’s next?”
The candidate used a similar user name of “P-Hustle” to post profane comments on Reddit forums — including one about how women worried about rape should “not get so f–ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to.”
“Maine, I am asking you not to judge me for the worst thing I said on the internet, on my worst day 14 years ago, but who I am today and the kind of senator I promise to be,” Platner later said in an ad.
He is currently ahead of Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in the Maine general election’s polls by 7.8 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics aggregator, though ex-Democratic primary opponent and Gov. Janet Mills recently reminded voters she remains on the June 9 state ballot.
Asked about the likelihood that Mills, who suspended her campaign, triumphs over Platner due to the ballot remaining the same, one Democratic operative told The Post, “I just don’t think it’s going to happen — grassroots would flip out. It’s Platner or bust at this point.”
