The Missouri Republican Party defended Gov. Eric Greitens after he was indicted on one charge stemming from a 2015 extramarital affair, and called the indictment a “political hit job.”
“Missourians should see this for what it is, a political hit job. This law has never been prosecuted in this way and it is safe to say if Eric Greitens wasn’t governor, it wouldn’t have been this time either,” the state party said.
Greitens, a Republican, was indicted by a St. Louis grand jury on one felony charge of invasion of privacy. According to the indictment, Greitens “knowingly photographed” a woman who was either partially or fully nude without her consent in March 2015. He then “transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer,” the indictment said.
The charge stems from Greitens’s 2015 extramarital affair, which he admitted. The ex-husband of the woman involved in the relationship claimed Greitens took a nude photo of the woman and used it to blackmail her to keep the affair under wraps.
A lawyer for Greitens denied the governor wanted to blackmail the woman, and in a statement Thursday, Greitens denounced the indictment.
“As I have said before, I made a personal mistake before I was Governor. I did not commit a crime,” Greitens said in a statement reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “With today’s disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken. I know this will be righted soon. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points.”
The Missouri Republican Party echoed Greitens’s statement and criticized St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner. She launched an investigation into the allegations against Greitens in January.
The state party claimed Gardner was the beneficiary of $200,000 from groups tied to liberal billionaire George Soros.
“We have a progressive anti-law enforcement Democrat wanting to single-handedly oust a law-and-order governor,” the Missouri Republican Party said. “We look forward to a bipartisan committee of legislators elected by people across Missouri to find out what’s really going on — ensuring St. Louis liberals aren’t controlling the future of our state.”
