Courtesy of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP
Governor Eric Greitens when arrested
If hypocrisy were to become an Olympic sport, Governor Eric Greitens would surely add some gold medals to his legendary résumé.
Missouri’s cocky, swashbuckling, self-congratulatory Renaissance man isn’t merely an outsider when it comes to government. He’s an outsider when it comes to honor.
This is the guy who swept into his first elected office in 2016 on the coattails of Donald Trump, of all people, promising to clean up Jefferson City with reforms and transparency aimed at “corrupt career politicians.” Seeing as how Democrats had been reduced to a sparse tribe in the Capitol well before Greitens’ arrival, he was actually attacking his own Republican Party, but until recently, that didn’t matter.
Remember, Greitens’ bravado was backed up by that eye-popping résumé: a suburban St. Louis kid made good as a Rhodes scholar, Navy SEAL, nationally recognized humanitarian, best-selling author, founder of an admired not-for-profit serving veterans and—last but not least—loyal husband and father.
Of course, none of the political rhetoric turned out to be anything meaningful; it never does. But what sets Greitens apart from all previous governors is the degree to which he has made things worse as a politician—and, from all appearances, as a person.
Mr. Clean Up the Corruption smashed all state records for raising “dark money,” through which murky not-for-profits—which aren’t required to reveal their own donors— funnel campaign gifts to politicians. Greitens didn’t invent the sordid practice, but he took it to breathtaking new heights with a $1.9 million donation in 2016 from, well, someone. He also set a new standard for raising out-of-state money, with a sizable percentage of his donations coming from unknown donors taking a mysterious interest in our state.
Doubling down on that, Greitens became the first governor in modern history to refuse to reveal the dollar amount heaped by donors upon his lavish inauguration. His people did provide a list of donors, although there’s no way to be sure it’s complete without an itemized accounting of how much was raised.
Greitens doesn’t do accountability. He avoids unscripted press conferences even more assiduously than Trump does. Greitens’ staff routinely ignores media inquiries, and their boss has used an app that automatically erases his texts. This man of the people only lowers himself to communicate with those people through social media, where he can maintain full control of the message.
That’s probably smart. The message—or as he likes to call it, “the mission”—can’t withstand even cursory inquiry, much less pointed follow-up questions.
Most recently, it turns out that one major source of murky political support came through what seems to be a rather curious use of the not-for-profit he founded, The Mission Continues. No doubt, this is a wonderful cause and Greitens deserves all the credit he has happily received for founding it, but there are these troubling little details—laws, I believe they’re called—that govern the use of their donor lists for political purposes.
By some strange set of circumstances, Greitens’ campaign received the not-for-profits’ list, and, even more coincidentally, a striking number of donors care about both veterans and Greitens. Nothing wrong with that. But about those laws? Well, there’s enough smoke that Attorney General Josh Hawley—another rising young Republican star—has announced an investigation into Greitens’ erstwhile pride and joy.
In any other year, a Missouri attorney general on the ballot for U.S. Senate launching a serious probe essentially aimed at the governor of his own party would be quite a story. In this case? Meh. Is Hawley serious about this, or is he just going through the motions to keep his rival, incumbent U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, from pounding him over not doing anything? Who knows? Who cares?
But it looks like the theme of the Greitens administration ought to be The Investigations Continue.
Obviously, I haven’t gotten to the Big One. Because for all the corrupt appearances of the guy who was going to clean up corruption, the only bad behavior that may matter in the end is what took place nearly two years before Greitens was elected, in the privacy of his own home, with a woman other than his wife.
Greitens has been indicted by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner for felony invasion of privacy. At issue is whether, after tying up his mistress in the basement of his happy home, he took her photo without her consent—as she told her husband in a sobbing confession she didn’t know was being recorded. The next question is whether he threatened to spread it everywhere if she ever breathed a word about what they had done.
We’ll see.
One irony is worth noting as we grab the popcorn and settle into our easy chairs to watch this spectacle unfold. An item on Greitens’ résumé that deserves more attention is the spectacular photographs he took during his humanitarian work abroad. They’re on display at museums all over the country. If nothing else, Greitens is a great photographer—but he may have taken one photo too many.
Members of the state’s overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives made a new kind of political history by voting 154 – 0 to set impeachment hearings in motion. Are they serious about this? We’ll see.
I don’t need to bore you with the details. Besides, the story will have changed a dozen times between my writing about it and your reading about it. But some CliffNotes from the breaking of the initial scandal story will be worth remembering as the whole miserable thing unfolds:
- Win, lose, or draw, Greitens is really on the Hypocrisy Olympics gold medal platform for this one. This guy didn’t just market himself, ad nauseam, as a “family man.” He exploited the wife he was cheating on, as well as his children, portraying them in his campaign commercials and, after victory, in official state photos. He did this to a far greater degree than most politicians do. Of course, the wife and kids are innocent victims in this story, but by putting them so prominently on view in his political world, it was Greitens himself who victimized them, not the people surveying the results of his train wreck.
- Greitens did admit “a personal mistake” in having an affair. Implied in his repeated references to that admission is that he’s a man who’s stood up and acknowledged what he’s done wrong. Memo to file: He only came clean at the moment most politicians do: after being caught.
- Greitens tried to set himself up as a victim by standing next to his wife in public and sharing a statement with her asking for privacy from the evil media. With no disrespect to Mrs. Greitens, there’s a name for men like her husband who use the spouse they cheated upon as a human shield: He’s a coward.
I’m bringing these initial stories up again because they’re easily lost in the noise of each story du jour. I don’t know what’s going to come of Gardner’s prosecution, which certainly appears at the outset to have some flaws. Republicans who neither have nor want a defense of Greitens have seized the opportunity to attack her, calling her motivation political and her prosecution frivolous.
I’m happy to wait until the matter is legally resolved—either by trial or by some form of dismissal—rather than speculate on Gardner’s motivation or on Greitens’ guilt or innocence.
None of that, of course, is as interesting as the circus in Jefferson City. Greitens isn’t disliked there; he’s despised. He’s earned those stripes with his big, bad bully-boy acting, spraying insults and threats at his fellow politicians—mostly Republican—as if he were firing a machine gun in a campaign ad.
And how about the irony? Greitens, the man who was going to overhaul Jefferson City with a whole new approach to politics, has succeeded in uncorking something truly new: an impeachment process governed by a statute so vague that no one really knows what the rules are.
Greitens’ hypocrisy will be his legacy. Whether the governor is convicted and thrown from office (which I still doubt will happen) or he survives and acts like it was all some fake-news attack on what’s left of his honor, that legacy will remain.
Eric Greitens, you wanted a new approach to politics? You got it.
