🍻In This Week's Hill Spill: Graham Platner's Exes Have Notes, A Georgia Runoff Gets Its Receipts Out and One Very Dramatic Hallway Encounter

Welcome to this week's Hill Spill! It's Thursday, so you know what that means. 🍹 It's been a week. A Senate primary that was supposed to be a done deal is suddenly very much not, with sexting allegations and a New York Times story piling on top of the Nazi tattoo situation. A Georgia runoff is heating up with some colorful opposition research, and a Capitol hallway "assault" that the whole internet is now watching in slow-mo. Never a dull moment in this place. So pour something good and let's get into it. 🫖

Graham Platner came into this week as the presumptive Democratic nominee in one of the most watched Senate races in the country. By Thursday, he was doing damage control on a Nazi tattoo, sexting allegations, and a New York Times story about his exes. 😬

The new abuse allegations from past relationships emerged just ahead of Tuesday's primary, with some Democrat sources telling us they are questioning whether Janet Mills may be the better option despite the age criticisms that sidelined her campaign.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Platner sexted between six and 12 women early in his marriage, and that his wife Amy Gertner disclosed the messages to a campaign aide before he even held his first rally. The campaign decided it wasn't a big deal. Then the Times came out with its own story based on interviews with more than two dozen people including six ex-girlfriends, detailing allegations of physical intimidation and volatile behavior. One ex, Lyndsey Fifield, described him grabbing her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks, pulling her by the wrist and shoving her into a bedroom and holding the door closed, adding that he never hit or punched her. Platner denied all of it.

The embattled candidate sat down with Chris Hayes shortly after the NYT article dropped on Thursday for his first national interview since the stories broke. He denied the physical allegations, denied knowing his Totenkopf chest tattoo was a Nazi symbol before last October, even after Hayes pointed out that Fifield's texts from August 2025 showed she was telling friends it was a Totenkopf months before Platner claimed to find out.

Her argued that she didn't send those texts to him. On the sexting, he opted not to get into specifics, telling the MS NOW host he and his wife worked through it and are very happy, arguing that the leak was a betrayal of his wife's trust by a former staffer.

When Hayes asked point blank whether there were texts or pictures still out there that could surface in October, Platner said he wasn't worried but didn’t say no.

"I'm not saying there's not texts in my life through a number of years struggling and not exactly acting with the best behavior,” he said.

Mills has been clear she is still on the ballot.

"People have the impression that I withdrew or dropped out," she told the Portland Press Herald. "I simply suspended active campaigning."

A GOP operative told us their response to the Hayes interview was a Spotify link: Taylor Swift's "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived."

A congressional primary runoff in Georgia is getting ugly fast, and we've got tea. ☕

Dr. John Cowan's campaign dropped a new ad this week going after former Loudermilk chief of staff Rob Adkerson over his past arrests — assault and battery, plus a shoplifting bust at Home Depot where Adkerson told police he stole the items to fund a drug habit. The ad also digs up old comments where Adkerson called Trump a liar and a fraud, and closes with: "Rob Adkerson, wrong for Georgia."

We pulled the police reports. The arrests are real.

But Adkerson told us he isn't running from any of it. The Georgia Republican said he's been sharing the story on the trail for months. The Home Depot arrest was 26 years ago, he said, and it was the moment he hit rock bottom. He said heard himself tell a cop he was stealing to buy drugs and decided right there to change.

"That was literally the first day of the rest of my life," he told us, adding he's since built a business and spent over a decade as Loudermilk's chief of staff. He calls it a story of hope. "If you change course, this is what you can do,” he said.

Whether Republican primary voters see it that way on June 16 is another question.

Meanwhile, Adkerson is hitting back at Cowan over old social media posts critical of Trump, accusing him of "spending millions to lie to voters about being Pro-Trump."

Cowan addressed the posts at a primary debate, acknowledged he'd spoken his mind at times, and said he wants to move forward. He led the May 19 primary with 42.6% to Adkerson's 21.7%.

The runoff is June 16.

In a very special episode of the pod, we caught up with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and a few of his teammates—including the team manager, Roger Williams, and Tim Burchett—at a crisp 5:45 AM for an inside look at the Congressional Baseball Game, which is easily one of our favorite events of the year over at Sources Say.

On the lighter side of things, we get a breakdown of the team's strategy to beat the Democrats, how they handle the grueling 5:45 AM wake-up calls and why they are eyeing former NY Yankee Mark Teixeira for next year’s roster. Scalise even laughs about crushing a scrimmage while stuck wearing a backyard-injury walking boot. (He also let us in on a little off-camera secret about the custom championship hats they designed last year, and how they gifted one to Trump after their big win.)

But the heart of this episode goes deeper. Scalise opens up about the horrific 2017 shooting at their morning practice, detailing what it was like to learn to walk all over again after three and a half months in the hospital. He shares a deeply personal, moving story about how a visit to a burned-down church in Louisiana completely changed his perspective on healing, and the exact moment he realized that letting go of the burden meant finding the power to forgive his shooter. Grab a bev and tune in!

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) walked out of her Rubio hearing Wednesday, having just questioned the Secretary about Code Pink’s alleged CCP ties, only to have co-founder Medea Benjamin follow her into the hallway and get in her face about Cuba sanctions. Annoying. We get it.

But then Benjamin’s hand briefly grazed Luna’s elbow. Benjamin immediately said “I’m sorry.”

Luna called Capitol Police and filed a statement, posted on X that she’d been “smacked,” told TMZ she was pressing charges and demanded Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) ban Code Pink from the Capitol entirely.

She then spoke with TMZ's Jacob Wasserman, who asked her to re-enact how she was hit. "I was literally walking, trying to walk away from this person, and they smacked me," she said. When asked if she was injured, she walked it back to: "If you don't touch anyone, especially if you don't like what they're saying, you cannot physically harm someone." So, not injured then.

Code Pink released the video. Multiple angles and slow-mo replays. It is… an elbow graze. Outlets across the political spectrum, including Gateway Pundit, not exactly a Code Pink fan club, called the assault framing somewhere between a stretch and outright silly. One GOP member we asked about it privately just laughed: “Have you seen the video?”

But she also has some defenders, with members acknowledging they, too, get irritated by the group.

Luna’s spox David Leatherwood offered the more measured take on X.

“It doesn’t matter how big or small the physical contact was, it’s completely unacceptable to cross that personal boundary with a U.S. Representative when harassing them with heated debate,” he said.

No charges were confirmed as of press time and the video remains available for your own slow-mo review.

I was feeling uninspired on what to make this week's bev, so one of our favorite newsletter readers and foreign policy reporters, Laura, suggested a Ukrainian drink since the House passed new aid for Ukraine and sanctions targeting industries fueling Russia's war economy with the assist of 18 Republicans.