One must almost admire—marvel at, anyway—the hubris of Missouri governor Eric Greitens. A former lover has accused him of coercive and violent sexual misconduct, a claim backed by significant circumstantial evidence; a Missouri House oversight committee led by members of Greitens’ own party judged her testimony credible. Republican leaders in both houses of the General Assembly have called for Greitens to step down, making impeachment proceedings possible if not likely. And yet Greitens continues to insist that the accusations against him are a politically motivated witch hunt, that he is determined to have his day in court, and that he certainly will not resign.
It may be a smart strategy: The criminal case against Greitens, which hinges on a nude picture he is accused of taking without the woman’s consent (leading to invasion of privacy charges), is by no means open-and-shut. Prosecutors do not have the picture in question, for one thing. That leaves the accusations—obscene and sickening though they may be—largely the governor’s word against the woman’s, and his legal team has left no stone unturned in attempting to undermine her credibility. Meanwhile, Greitens has apparently managed to convince a significant number of Missouri Republicans: although his poll numbers have worsened significantly, a full 63 percent of GOP voters still support him.
But Greitens is now facing a new legal challenge—one that may actually be even more difficult to wriggle out of. What is this new accusation? That Greitens illegally obtained the donor list of a charity, The Mission Continues, so that his campaign could target its donors to fundraise. (Greitens founded The Mission Continues in 2007, but left it in 2014.) According to Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, who made the announcement Tuesday, the state has reason to believe Greitens did this without the charity’s knowledge, which would amount to felony computer tampering in Missouri. Hawley said his office had obtained a court’s permission to hand the evidence over to St. Louis prosecutors.
There’s good reason to believe Greitens will have a harder time waving the new charges away. For one thing, if Hawley says he has evidence that Greitens tampered with computers, that evidence is almost certainly in the form of hard computer records. It’s one thing for Greitens to convince a jury (to say nothing of his erstwhile supporters) that shadowy forces are conspiring to undermine his term in office with trumped-up sex charges. It’s another to try to explain away incriminating copies of your own records.
And there’s another reason why these charges might prove more damaging to Greitens’ reputation, at least in the minds of those who voted him into office in the first place. For the entirety of his young political career, Greitens has styled himself a principled outsider uniquely qualified to take on government corruption in Missouri—a political messiah figure in the vein of Donald Trump. And as with Trump, many voters have so far stuck with Greitens because the sex scandal, gross as it may be, has little to do with his performance in office. The governor, who has admitted to the affair but not the misconduct, has worke to bolster this narrative, characterizing it as a temporary moral failing unrelated to the quality of his work.
The computer tampering charge, by contrast, has everything to do with Greitens’ political integrity. If Hawley is to be believed, then Greitens was feloniously scraping his old charity’s computers for politically useful financial information at the exact same time that he was criss-crossing the state telling voters he was the only candidate who could truly clean up the state government. If Missouri Republicans can’t trust him on that, what do they have left to trust?
