Missouri governor Eric Greitens—charged with a sexual felony, accused of campaign finance crimes, approval rating underwater, impeachment a strong possibility—could be nearing the end of his political career. But the Republican appears to be set on taking as much of his own party with him as possible, beginning with his attorney general—and U.S. Senate contender—Josh Hawley.
Over the last few weeks, Greitens has pursued an aggressive campaign to discredit Hawley, whose office is among those investigating the governor’s misconduct. Greitens launched his first attack on April 17, after Hawley announced he had uncovered evidence that Greitens had, in addition to his sexual misconduct, committed a campaign-finance-related crime.
“Fortunately for Josh, he’s better at press conferences than the law,” Greitens said of Hawley, a former law professor with degrees from Stanford and Yale. He then smeared Hawley for turning that evidence over to the prosecutor of jurisdiction, St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner, whom Greitens characterized as “a liberal prosecutor funded by George Soros who allegedly suborned perjury, falsified documents, and withheld evidence.”
Greitens continued to press the attack April 18, filing a court complaint arguing that Hawley’s candidacy for Senate should disqualify him from his current job pursuing criminal investigations. “Hawley must recuse himself and his entire office from any investigation or prosecution related to Gov. Greitens or the Governor’s Office,” attorney Michelle Nasser wrote in the filing. “If such investigation or prosecution is to be conducted, it must be conducted by a court-appointed special prosecutor independent of the AGO.” Hawley waved off the motion as “frivolous.” The judge apparently agreed and rejected the governor’s request.
This week, a Missouri house committee released a report explaining in detail the evidence that Hawley uncovered, including that Greitens reportedly used a charity’s donor list for political fundraising and then lied about the incident to ethics investigators. In contrast to his earlier brashness, the governor is laying low since the report’s release, but he hasn’t rescinded his attacks on the attorney general.
Greitens’s loose-cannon act isn’t a political problem that’s unique to Hawley, of course: The explosive scandals, which center around allegations of sexual misconduct, including that Greitens took a surreptitious nude photograph of a paramour to coerce her into silence about the affair, have created headaches for GOP contenders across the state. In the St. Louis suburbs that make up the comfortably red 2nd District, where incumbent Ann Wagner is defending a seat that has been Republican since 1993, Greitens’s unfavorable rating has spiked to 65 percent. A dizzying 81 percent of self-described moderates in the district disapprove of the governor, according to the Wagner campaign’s internal polling. (Wagner’s campaign declined to comment on how Greitens’s behavior would affect her electoral chances.)
But the governor’s personal attacks on Hawley mean the attorney general has an even trickier road to navigate than do candidates like Wagner. He’s not only in danger of suffering guilt-by-party-association with Greitens among independents and moderates. In a neck-and-neck race against incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill, he also has to avoid hemorrhaging any support among the Republican base—and the 50-odd-percent of them who still support Greitens as governor.
For Greitens’s staunch supporters, the actions alleged about the governor amount to a regrettable indiscretion at worst and at best simply demonstrate that he’s managed to rattle the right establishment cages—much like another frequently embattled politician they’re fond of. “I don’t approve of what they’re saying he did, but it’s nothing the Democrats haven’t done,” one Vernon County Republican told the Kansas City Star this week. Said another, “Governor Greitens is on the same program as President Trump.”
It’s a connection Greitens himself has often tried to make. “The people of Missouri see through this, and they know far better than to trust one-sided tabloid trash gossip,” he claimed on April 12, hours before the Missouri house committee released its initial report detailing the unsettling allegations against him. “This is exactly like what’s happening with the witch hunts in Washington, D.C.” Trump himself, who endorsed Greitens during his 2016 campaign and has endorsed Hawley’s Senate run this year, has not commented on the scandal.
The result has been that Hawley’s campaign, which has until now kept its messaging relentlessly focused on McCaskill, has been forced to play defense. The campaign pushed out an internal poll April 30 boasting of a statistical tie between the two candidates: “An incredibly vulnerable position for an incumbent six months out from an election.” The press release also noted, “Although Governor Greitens has taken a hit, this has not impacted the Republican brand in the state as Josh Hawley and President Trump remain in an excellent position heading into the summer.” Beyond that cheery “nothing-to-see-here” note, the campaign is loath to discuss Greitens at all. “What Josh has said is that he’s doing the job he was elected to do as attorney general,” Hawley’s campaign manager Kyle Plotkin told The Weekly Standard. “He has to follow wherever the facts may lead, and he’ll keep doing that.” But will that hurt him among Republican voters? “That’s for you and political pundits to determine.”
If there’s good news for Hawley in any of this, it’s that Missouri Democrats’ messaging strategy, which attempts to paint him as a Greitens stooge, looks more misguided than ever. Pro-McCaskill super-PAC ads released in March accused the attorney general of soft-balling the Greitens investigation, saying Hawley “came to the governor’s rescue” and speculating that he was “bought and paid for” (a reference to a contribution Greitens’s campaign made to Hawley’s in 2016). The attacks were unconvincing then; now they just look silly.
“It gives Josh every opportunity to prove what he is proving now, which is that he is a no-nonsense, law-and-order, effective attorney general,” Republican strategist Gregg Keller told The Weekly Standard. “A lot of attorneys general toil in relative obscurity and do their jobs quietly. Josh does not have that luxury, which is both a challenge and an opportunity. . . . If you look at Missouri politicians who have been willing to take on malfeasance within their own party and take on members of their own party, Josh Hawley is walking the walk.”
Nevertheless, Keller concedes that the Greitens fiasco has complicated Hawley’s path to the Senate. Which leads to an obvious question: In a year when Hawley’s candidacy may prove the difference between Republicans holding the Senate and losing both houses to the Democrats, how can Greitens be willing to risk that kind of damage?
For Keller, who opposed Greitens’s campaign in 2016, the answer is simple: “He doesn’t care. He simply does not care. He’s only been a Republican for a couple years now; he’s a nominal Republican at best. . . . And he’s never been a member in good standing of the conservative movement more broadly. So this is not someone who’s going to retrace their steps or take the Republican party in mind, nor the conservative movement, nor what’s best for that movement or party.” This may be true, but it’s apparently still the minority viewpoint as far as Missouri Republicans are concerned.
For all of his rhetoric, Eric Greitens is no Donald Trump: He’s riding no particular zeitgeist, and scandals don’t just bounce off of him. And the alleged campaign finance crime, though less salacious and disturbing than the sexual accusations, is backed by the kind of damning paper trail against which the defense of “Witch hunt!” is notoriously ineffective.
How long he can continue to hold on to the governorship through sheer willpower, as all around him his party withdraws its support, remains to be seen. But Greitens seems to have absorbed one crucial presidential lesson: It’s amazing how well you can get along in politics these days if you don’t care who you have to attack.
