Cory Booker has ‘concerns’ with Graham Platner’s Senate bid after leaked texts | Cory Booker
A high-profile Democrat has expressed concerns about party candidate Graham Platner’s Maine U.S. Senate campaign after it was revealed that Platner sent a series of sexually explicit messages to other women while married.
“Yes, I have concerns,” U.S. senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said Sunday. This Week on ABC host Jonathan Karl when asked about Platner’s revelations. ““This man has questions to answer, and that’s what campaigns are for.”
Booker then emphasized the importance of the Democratic party winning majorities in the U.S. House and Senate in November’s midterm elections as Donald Trump approaches his second presidency.
Implying that prices in the country, including gasoline, have increased due to the unresolved US war in Iran, Booker said, “It depends on the Democrats taking control of Congress from the president’s Republican party.” “If we don’t get the votes necessary to get the business of the House and the Senate done, we will continue to have an out-of-control president.”
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, found sexually explicit text messages on her husband’s phone in the spring of 2025 and shared them with the campaign’s then-political director, Genevieve McDonald.
“The United States Senate is not a training ground for salvation. It is a place for proven leaders with moral clarity and integrity,” McDonald told the New York Times.
HE resigned from the campaign in October 2025, following controversial Reddit posts Platner made between 2009 and 2021, and following reports that the candidate had a Nazi symbol tattoo.
Gertner, who married Platner in 2023, criticized the former employee’s leaked messages and noted that the couple went to marriage counseling after discovering the messages.
“I disclosed deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” Gertner said in a statement. “I entrusted this person with the most special part of our lives; the first days of our marriage, without any campaign in mind.”
Platner is the presumptive Democratic nominee ahead of the June 9 party primary to run against Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins in the November general election. Janet Mills, the governor of Maine and another Democratic candidate, dropped out of the race in April.
