Two of Missouri’s highest profile Republicans are butting heads. One is a governor enveloped in legal drama; the other is a state attorney general investigating said governor while also campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
That governor, Eric Greitens, has hired Ed Dowd, a prominent Missouri attorney, as part of his legal team. Dowd also happens to be a donor to state Attorney General Josh Hawley’s opponent, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.
As legal matters go, it isn’t so odd. But as a political matter, it’s quite a bizarre set-up, wherein the Democratic lawyer for a Republican governor is also fighting the Republican Senate candidate on a legal playing field whom he’s financially invested in defeating on a political playing field.
Hawley is the prohibitive front-runner in Missouri’s Republican Senate primary to take on McCaskill this November.
“Talk of the legal team’s connections to Democrats has been circulating among Republican state lawmakers in recent days,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported last month. Indeed, one state GOP lawmaker noted Dowd’s contributions to McCaskill in an email obtained by the Kansas City Star in April.
“According to federal campaign finance records, one of Greitens’ attorneys, Ed Dowd contributed more than $11,000 to U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill when she last ran in 2012,” the Post-Dispatch noted. “He also contributed over $9,000 to the Missouri Democratic Party that year.”
Dowd most recently donated $2,700 to the McCaskill Victory Fund on Feb. 6, and $2,000 to McCaskill for Missouri on Dec. 21, FEC records show. He donated another $2,700 to both groups on Oct. 11, one day after Hawley formally announced his campaign. Dowd also spent thousands backing McCaskill in her prior two Senate elections.
As the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker reported this week, “Twin Greitens scandals, one involving an extramarital affair from before he was elected governor, the other concerning his management of a veterans’ charity, could invite impeachment proceedings in the Missouri Legislature.”
Hawley’s office announced on Monday it had opened an inquiry into Greitens’ social media use. Last week, the governor’s legal team filed a restraining order to prevent Hawley from investigating the veteran’s charity, arguing “that by calling for Gov. Greitens to resign, he has predetermined the guilt of his own investigative target and his investigation now is clearly compromised.”
The attorneys further accused Hawley of having a “personal interest in the outcome of his investigation, namely that the Governor resign or be impeached” and requested the appointment of a special prosecutor. Their request was denied by a judge on Friday.
Another of Greitens’ attorneys, James Bennett, has donated to Republican candidates, according to FEC records.
Dowd sent Hawley a letter on April 16 asking him to recuse himself from investigation into Greiten’s charity. “By his own published standards, AG Hawley’s official public call for Gov. Greitens to resign — while it may have been politically expedient — compromises the AGO’s own ongoing investigation of Gov. Greitens,” Dowd wrote.
It all amounts to a strange but compelling triangle of competing interests, perhaps not uncommon in the small circles of state-based politics. Although, as Drucker reported on Monday, Hawley’s campaign “disputes that Greitens is having any measurable impact on the Senate race” to begin with.
