George Mitchell has resigned from a Maine charity bearing his name.
The former U.S. Senate majority leader and federal judge resigned this week as honorary chair of the Mitchell Institute, the charity’s executive board announced Thursday.
“We have accepted that resignation. We also agree that this is an appropriate time to initiate a thoughtful, responsible process to consider a potential name change,” the board wrote in a statement.
That comes as Mitchell, who represented Maine in the U.S. Senate from 1980 to 1995, deals with the fallout from the U.S. Justice Department’s release of a tranche of 3 million pages of documents related to its investigations into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking and abuse of young girls. Mitchell’s name is mentioned more than 300 times in the latest release.
Mitchell, 92, has forcefully denied any knowledge of or involvement in Epstein’s crimes. The Waterville native cut ties with Epstein following his 2008 conviction in Florida, though Epstein continued to try to arrange meetings with the Mainer until about 2013. The federal government’s plea deal with Epstein came under scrutiny after a 2018 Miami Herald expose, leading ultimately to the disgraced financier and sex offender’s arrest in 2019 and death in custody.
Mitchell, who has long been held as a statesman alongside the likes of Edmund Muskie and Margaret Chase Smith, is facing a major reputational hit because of his friendship with Epstein. Mitchell played a key role in leading the Iran-Contra hearings, guiding the North American Free Trade Agreement to ratification, exposing the use of steroids and growth hormones in Major League Baseball, and brokering the Good Friday Agreement, which brought a period of peace to divided Ireland.
Earlier this week, the US-Ireland Alliance removed the peacemaker’s name from a scholarship, and a Northern Ireland university removed his name from a peace center and said it would take down a bust of him at the campus.
The Mitchell Institute was established in the 1990s with the goal of helping Maine students pursue a college education despite a lack of financial assistance.
“For 30 years, this organization has embraced the ambitious mission of increasing the likelihood that young people from every community in Maine aspire to and achieve a college education,” the institute’s executive board said.