AUGUSTA — A liberal advocacy group is pressing for an investigation by Maine’s attorney general into a conservative think tank which secretly recorded an invitation-only conference call held last week by several immigrants’ rights activists.

Maine People’s Alliance, one of the groups that participated in the call, wants an investigation into Steve Robinson, editor of the Maine Heritage Policy Center’s media arm, The Maine Wire, who surreptitiously recorded the discussion and posted it online.

Robinson began touting the secret recording on social media on Monday. He provided the recording to the Bangor Daily News on Tuesday, claiming that he obtained it from a call participant whose identity he had agreed to protect.

The reason for obtaining and releasing the recording, according to Robinson, was to show several ostensibly apolitical nonprofit groups inappropriately conspiring to defend the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud, from Republican attack ads.

Several of the nonprofit groups involved are barred from that sort of political activity.

However, a record of conference call participants provided by Maine Equal Justice Partners, which organized the call, included a telephone number for the The Maine Wire. When the BDN called the number Wednesday, Robinson answered.

Robinson then admitted it was he who had listened in on the conversation, and said the conference call information was passed to him by a state employee. The story of the anonymous source, he said, was made up.

“I didn’t want them to know that I had recorded their call, in case future opportunities arose to listen in on a conference call,” he said.

The Maine People’s Alliance is accusing the Maine Heritage Policy Center of using “sleazy” tactics akin to illegal phone hacking and has asked for Robinson’s firing.

“The right’s attacks on Maine immigrants seem to have now crossed the line from sleazy scapegoating into outright criminality,” said MPA Executive Director Jesse Graham in a statement to the BDN. “We ask that the Maine Heritage Policy Center fire any employees that were involved in this phone hacking and we anticipate a criminal investigation as well.”

Tim Feeley, a spokesman for Attorney General Janet Mills, a Democrat, said her office was aware of the MPA’s claim, and will evaluate it.

Later Wednesday, after an initial version of this story was published online, MHPC executive director Matt Gagnon announced that MHPC had also asked the attorney general to investigate whether Maine People’s Alliance and Maine Equal Justice Partners had “coordinated illegally to advocate for Congressman Michaud’s gubernatorial campaign.”

Those groups, he said, “have engaged in potentially illegal coordination for the benefit of a gubernatorial candidate. The contents of this call may represent a direct violation of the c3 status of some of the groups that participated in the call.”

The recording

The conference call took place Sept. 4 and included representatives from Maine nonprofit policy and advocacy groups including the Maine People’s Alliance, Maine Equal Justice Partners, the NAACP, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition and others engaged in advocacy for Maine’s immigrants.

Maine Equal Justice Partner said it convened the call to strategize a response to a recent Republican Governors Association advertisement that criticized Michaud over immigrants’ access to public benefits.

The ad referenced a legal dispute between Republican Gov. Paul LePage and some Maine municipalities, as well as Maine Equal Justice Partners, over public assistance benefits for undocumented immigrants.

Most of the groups involved in the call, such as Maine Equal Justice Partners, are barred from participating in electioneering by federal law, but are allowed to participate in public policy debate and educational efforts.

Others on the call, such as the Maine People’s Alliance, are allowed under federal law to participate in specific candidate advocacy or other political work. MPA has endorsed Michaud.

A review of the recording by the BDN found the nature of conversation on the call split along those lines.

MPA organizing director Kevin Simowitz said the RGA’s immigration ad was “one of the most effective ads a lot of us have seen in a long time” in swaying Democratic-leaning voters away from Michaud and toward LePage.

Simowitz said he thought the best response would be to criticize LePage for perceived financial mismanagement, but conceded that such a response likely would cause other groups on the call to opt out because of the restrictions on political activity.

Ralph Carmona, a liberal activist and former Portland mayoral candidate, also said “if we don’t think (our response) is politically astute for the election of Michaud, then we shouldn’t do it.”

However, several other call participants disagreed, and said they remained committed to an issues-based response to the ad.

“If (the goal) is about trying to sway people to vote a certain way, or engage in that way, that gets back to the (political restrictions) question, and I’m not sure we have a stake in that in the same way as folks who are canvassing for Michaud do,” said Cait Vaughan, an organizer with the Southern Maine Workers Center.

Robyn Merrill, Maine Equal Justice Partners senior policy analyst, also said during the call that the proper response for the groups was “clarifying the misleading information in the ad,” not politics.

Sara Gagne-Holmes, Maine Equal Justice Partners’ executive director, said her organization also was researching the state’s law to see whether to pursue legal action over the recording.

“Like anyone who uses the phone to communicate with allies and partners, you expect a certain degree of privacy,” Gagne-Holmes said. “However, MEJP has nothing to hide. The content of that phone conference was all about educating the public about the inaccuracies in (the RGA’s) ad. It had nothing to do with electioneering.”

Questions raised

Maine is a “one-party consent” state, meaning that if two or more people in Maine have a conversation, one of them can record it without telling the others. Robinson said Wednesday he felt he was protected by the state’s one-party consent law as a participant in the phone conference, whether anyone knew he was there or not.

Berney Kubetz, a lawyer with Eaton Peabody who has represented the Bangor Daily News, said that Maine’s law makes it a crime to record a phone call with the use of an “intercepting device,” but that a telephone is not such a device.

Because Robinson simply called in to the conference, and didn’t use any special device to intercept the conversation, Kubetz said the recording likely was legal.

He said that other participants in the call could pursue a civil charge of invasion of privacy, but that also may not hold up in court.

“Given that it was a conference call with many politically active participants, and the subject of the call involved current political issues and strategies, it would not seem to be a reasonable expectation that a speaker’s comments would be kept confidential and not disseminated to others who were not on the call,” he said.

“The ethics of what was done is a different issue,” Kubetz said.

Regarding the possibility of legal action against him, Robinson replied: “Bring it on.”