Update: The long-anticipated Greitens trial sputtered to a strange conclusion Monday, with the St. Louis Attorney’s Office dropping the case before the jury selection process had even ended. The attorney’s office said in a statement that they were dropping the case because the judge ruled Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner could be called by the defense as a witness. Attorneys for Greitens have accused Gardner of prosecutorial misconduct. A spokeswoman for Gardner said they would seek a special prosecutor to refile the case.
* * *
Battered by a months-long barrage of sexual and political scandals that have convulsed his party and destroyed his mandate, Missouri governor Eric Greitens is finally having his day in court. The governor appeared in a St. Louis courthouse Monday to stand trial against the accusation that began his unraveling: that he took without consent a partially nude photograph of a woman he was romantically involved with.
Even beyond the obvious—the crime he’s charged with, invasion of privacy, is a felony carrying the potential penalty of four years’ incarceration—Greitens has a lot riding on this case. Despite the media maelstrom surrounding the scandal, the governor has refused to engage publicly with the accusations in any detail, opting instead to issue blanket denials and rail against his accusers as perpetrating a “witch hunt.” When House Republicans conducted an internal investigation of the woman’s accusation against Greitens, the governor refused even to speak to House investigators. Instead, he has asserted all along that the House investigation is a political attack—notwithstanding the fact that it has been conducted by members of his own party. Rather than challenge the accusations against him in a partisan setting, he said, he would await his day in court to demonstrate his innocence—and so here he is.
For better or worse, it’s a clever messaging strategy. The allegations against Greitens are disturbing: that he coerced his partner into giving him oral sex and then blackmailed her with the nude photo to keep her from going public. They are also well-corroborated: House investigators found that the woman confided her story in close friends and confessed it to her then-husband months before the accusations became public. In fact, the story became public only because her husband secretly recorded her confession to him, then leaked it to the media on his own—a perplexing recipe for a politically motivated takedown if ever there was one.
But the case about to go before a St. Louis jury doesn’t concern whether Greitens behaved abusively toward his former lover or blackmailed her. To secure a guilty verdict, prosecutors will have to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt not just that Greitens took the photo, but also that he “transmitted” it in such a way that it could be accessed by a computer—say, by uploading it to iCloud.
The woman has testified that she saw a flash and heard an iPhone shutter sound, and that Greitens specifically told her he had taken the photo and threatened to release it. Greitens’ lawyers unsuccessfully fought last week to prevent investigators from searching his phone for it, which doesn’t exactly scream “innocent”—but as of Friday, the search had apparently not turned up the photo. And even if they had, a guilty verdict would still require proof that Greitens had transmitted “the image in a matter that allows access to that image via computer.”
Which is to say that a jury might very well be convinced that Greitens behaved abominably toward the woman, but still find him innocent of the invasion of privacy charge. And given how hard Greitens and Co. have worked to question the legitimacy of the accusations against him, it’s clear that the governor’s team would trumpet such an acquittal as a complete vindication of Greitens’ conduct against the shadowy political skullduggery of the witch hunters. This would not necessarily help Greitens much at his next trial—the governor is still likely to face later charges for other political crimes, including campaign-finance violations and the alleged theft of a political donor list. But it might give him a political boost as the Missouri legislature contemplates whether to impeach him, as they will do in a special 30-day legislative session beginning May 18.
“From a legal standpoint, this is the weakest case. And his people are going to try to say that this is the end-all, be-all of impeachment—when of course it’s not.” Missouri GOP strategist Gregg Keller told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “Jefferson City Republican leadership is preparing their leaders for him to get off on some sort of technicality… We need to be prepared to move him out for a whole litany of reasons, a whole ton of reasons, of which this is the weakest one.”
