WASHINGTON — Mayor Mamdani’s whiz-kid spin doctor has been accused of pressuring Maine Senate hopeful Graham Platner’s ex political director to lie about the horny oyster farmer’s sexting scandal — and threatened her if she didn’t.
Morris Katz, the 27-year-old hot-shot strategist who helped catapult Mamdani to Gracie Mansion, allegedly pressed former Platner campaign staffer Genevieve McDonald to deny the sexting scandal to the press.
“Just want to be clear on where we are right now,” Katz wrote to McDonald through a third party, according to messages reported by Bangor Daily News.
“If the story goes in its current iteration, we’ll communicate directly on the record, and by name, that Genevieve violated the personal trust of Amy and Graham and shared explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”
Katz, who owns the firm Fight Agency, is working for Platner — who is the de facto Dem nominee for Maine’s Senate race.
The 27-year-old strategist’s warning was relayed through an adviser to Maine congressional hopeful Jordan Wood, according to docs obtained by BDN.
McDonald had worked on Wood’s campaign until Saturday.
She was one of three officials who quit Platner’s campaign last fall after wild details about his past emerged.
Katz had been incensed after the Platner campaign caught wind of a forthcoming Wall Street Journal story about Platner sexting up to a dozen women after marrying his wife in 2023.
The Katz demanded that McDonald call up the Wall Street Journal to deny the sexting scandal to the outlet and record herself doing that so she could send it to the campaign, BDN reported.
But McDonald didn’t take kindly to being threatened and instead went on the record with the New York Times, which confirmed the bombshell story shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported it.
The outlet reported that Platner had sexted as many as a dozen women, though his campaign claimed it was only six.
McDonald recounted how Platner’s wife informed her that she discovered her husband had sent sexually explicit images to various women while the campaign was doing internal opposition research to prepare for potential dirt his rivals might be able to dig up.
Katz had raged against McDonald on social media.
“It’s no one’s f—ing business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office,” he fumed. “There should be no place in our politics for incompetent, opportunistic operatives who violate privacy, betray trust, and prioritize vengeance over decency.”
The Post contacted the Platner campaign and attempted to reach Katz for comment.
Platner, 41, shied away from the media during his campaign event Sunday, and his team’s main response to the bombshell stories came from his wife, who cut a 5-minute video addressing the controversy by scolding the media and McDonald — although not by name.
The Marine veteran has faced a myriad of controversies, including Reddit posts downplaying sexual assault, defending soldiers urinating on dead Taliban soldiers, musing about graffiti of men’s genitalia, calling war “the most enjoyable experience,” contending that white Americans “actually are” racist and stupid, among others.
Recently, it emerged that he mocked a Purple Heart soldier who captured wild helmet footage of himself moving into the open to steer Taliban fire away from his fellow soldiers.
Perhaps most infamous of all, Platner is revealed to have had a tattoo on his chest resembling a Totenkopf or “death’s head” symbol used by the Nazi SS. The oyster farmer claims to have gotten that tattoo in Croatia while drunk in 2007 and denied advanced knowledge of its Nazi links.
Since then, he has inked over it with what he has described as a “Celtic knot with some imagery around dogs.”
Platner has a 7.8 percentage point polling edge over incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), according to the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls. Collins has a history of dramatically overperforming the RCP aggregate in past races, particularly her 2020 reelection.
