The criminal trial of a Hancock man accused of embezzling $225,000 from a U.S. Senate candidate is expected to begin Thursday morning in Ellsworth.
Matthew T. McDonald, 45, is facing a felony theft charge for allegedly misusing the money after Max Linn, who died of a heart attack in December 2021 when he was 62, had asked him earlier that year to invest the funds in cryptocurrency on Linn’s behalf.
McDonald worked for Linn’s U.S. Senate campaigns in Maine in 2018 and 2020, which failed to garner many votes but drew attention because of controversies and theatrics that Linn embraced during his runs.
A jury for McDonald’s trial on the charge was picked Tuesday in Hancock County Unified Criminal Court in Ellsworth. The trial is expected to last two days and is scheduled to begin the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 10, according to court officials.
Linn, who lived in Bar Harbor, had a public falling out with McDonald in the fall of 2021 after McDonald accused Linn of pointing a gun at him in a dispute over the money and went to court to seek a restraining order against the former Senate candidate. McDonald claimed that Linn instead wanted to use the funds to buy drugs from Indonesia that were being touted as COVID-19 cures, but Linn denied the accusations.
McDonald later told police he liquidated the cryptocurrency by investing it in the futures market, where it promptly was lost, according to court documents.
McDonald also is facing scrutiny in federal court over the alleged theft. Linn’s widow and his estate filed suit against McDonald in U.S. District Court in Bangor in August 2023, seeking to recover at least some of the money from McDonald and writing in their complaint that the loss of the funds “ultimately contributed to [Linn’s] untimely death.”
Last year, a federal judge denied a motion by McDonald to dismiss the federal complaint and later found him in default and ruled in favor of Linn’s widow and estate, ordering McDonald to repay the funds.
But a federal magistrate judge wrote in a recommended decision last month that McDonald does not have the ability to repay the money and that the court should not issue an installment order setting deadlines for when payments must be made.
“The final balance on [McDonald’s] most recent bank statement [from February 2025] was $29.19,” U.S. Magistrate Judge John Nivison wrote in the document.