(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The brother of Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills helped Chinese nationals execute the sale of an illicit marijuana farm in the state, the Maine Wire reported.
Xiling Ou, 44, was the original owner of the old house and its 9-acre parcel of land in Corinna, Maine.
But after the Penobscot Sheriff’s Department and agents from the Department of Homeland Security undertook a series of raids on nearby marijuana farms, within two weeks Ou had sold the parcel to her mother, Xiaoyu Lu—who lives in Foshan City, China, in the Guangdong Province.
The man who helped execute the Feb. 22 transaction was Janet Mills’s older brother, Paul Mills, who runs Mills & Mills law firm, located roughly 55 miles southwest of Corinna in Farmington.
Locals who were asked about the situation said that they found it unusual that a Farmington lawyer would be handling business in Penobscot County.
When the Maine Wire reached out to Paul Mills to ask about the transaction, he said that he was just doing his job and did not know the use to which the property was being put.
“I don’t know the purpose of the property which was being devoted to and ordinarily you do not do an analysis of that when you’re asked to do a deed,” Mills said.
Rural Maine has become a hotbed of the international drug trade, particularly in relation to Chinese drug trafficking operations.
Still, Mills, an attorney, denied any knowledge of such things.
“That would be news to me,” said Mills.
According to local officials, the property has been in flux for years as Ou repeatedly tried but failed to meet local inspection regulations.
Al Tempesta, Corinna’s code enforcement officer, said that he inspected the property twice and that it failed to meet minimum standards on both occasions.
Moreover, Tempesta suggested that the owners had tried to acquire a permit “to grow marijuana,” which he could not approve of because Corinna chose not to “opt-in” to the state’s “legal marijuana” growing program, meaning that there can be no large-scale operations.
