[BN] Politics Now 📩: Chris Collins gets the WaPo Style section treatment

You have to give Chris Collins a certain amount of credit for his shamelessness. His boldness.  

The former Congressman from Clarence, who was imprisoned in 2020 for insider trading, was the subject of a big takeout in this weekend’s Washington Post Style section focusing on Collins’ life in Florida after his pardon by President Donald Trump.

“Can this ex-congressman show Trump the path to life after indictment?” reads the WaPo headline. “Convicted for insider trading, Chris Collins got a pardon from Trump and found warm refuge in Florida — where crime is hardly a political liability, and comebacks are always possible.”

I reported in July that Collins was considering a run for Congress in Florida after his release from the federal penitentiary. In what was the best quote from the Post story, Liz Stephenson, one of Collins’ neighbors on Marco Island, explained why Collins’ conviction would not be a political liability.

“We have a lot of criminals and nuts down here,” Stephenson said of the Sunshine State.

The profile compares Collins to Trump and says the former president, if he is convicted of the numerous crimes of which he is accused, in a strange way could end up like Collins – disgraced but not defeated, and in a twisted way, wearing the conviction like some sort of badge of honor.  

There are interviews with some notable WNY politicos, including Nate McMurray, Chris Grant and Dennis Vacco, and friends such as Chris Graham of Volland Electric, as well as other colorful characters from inside the “Power Cubicle” of his prison block. 

The article says Vacco helped launch Collins’ political career at a Buffalo Sabres game, and also contains an interesting tidbit – part of a yet-unpublished memoir that was given to the article’s author – about Collins and the region’s old Westinghouse plant.

It references Collins’ rocky tenure as Erie…