Calling Missouri Republicans pious, gun-toting, racist frauds doesn’t make them any worse than Republicans anywhere else. It’s the brazen stupidity that sets them apart.
The GOP in Missouri largely reflects its donors and voters. It’s bigoted and white, representing white-flight exurbs or hollowed-out rural areas. It’s for more guns and less government, ignoring the reality that low-tax states like Kansas and Oklahoma are stagnating, while higher-tax higher-service states like California are booming. It’s anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-union and anti-black, while hiding behind white evangelical piety that barely disguises white nationalism.
So far, this pretty well describes any state’s GOP in the Age of Trump. But add an ousted governor with a taste for machine guns and (allegedly) basement bondage, a U.S. senator-elect who let corporate lobbyists run the state’s Attorney General’s Office (costing taxpayers millions), a political hit man who decided the Trump White House was too sleazy even for him, and a gaggle of anonymous right-wing millionaires, and you have the Show-Me State’s Republican Party. It’s a group that would be just as comfortable running a Nigerian social media scam as a state government.
The most recent example is Josh Hawley, Missouri’s pro-Trump Christian nationalist senator-elect (and current state attorney general) who has written that a politician’s job is to advance Christ’s kingdom and that Christians should be helping bring about End Times and the Second Coming. While his apocalyptic theology is straight out of Revelation, his ambition comes from Shakespeare, where most ambitious characters end up pretty badly.
Thanks to dogged reporting by the Kansas City Star, we know that a pair of Washington D.C. political consultants – Timmy Teepell and Gail Gitcho – along with two lobbying firms called OnMessage, Inc. and First Tuesday, basically ran the Missouri Attorney General’s office starting right after Hawley was sworn in as AG in January 2017.
The two used state tax dollars and state resources to frame and help design Hawley’s anti-opioid and anti-human trafficking initiatives as a way to raise Hawley’s national profile and position him for a U.S. Senate run, even though Hawley had campaigned for AG criticizing politicos who used their offices to campaign for even higher office. Pot, meet kettle.
The political consultants pushed Hawley’s ambition using state employees. Hawley refused to use his official state email account and instead communicated with them via private email. The interference by the consultants and Hawley’s rigid right-wing ideology led to an exodus of state civil litigation lawyers. And that meant Hawley’s office was short-staffed when it came to defending the state against civil claims.
Both the Post-Dispatch and New York Times reported that a combination of inexperienced lawyers and lack of staff in Hawley’s office meant Missouri taxpayers lost several civil suits in court, causing the state to cough up $35 million in fiscal year 2018. And that doesn’t count the judgment against the state for $113 million in back pay for prison guards.
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, has finally launched an investigation into Hawley’s use of the big money D.C. consultants to interfere in his office’s work. Hawley’s office, of course, calls the entire controversy “a political smear campaign.”
While the 38-year old Hawley deals with that, an even younger (and richer) GOP operative is facing an investigation into his work for disgraced former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. Greitens became governor because of his outsider image, a TV ad where he used a machine gun to blow up a target, and some very large money donations from some very anonymous donors.
This is where Nick Ayers comes in. The 36-year old Ayers is Vice President Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff and has been in the news in the past few days for turning down the chief of staff position in the Trump White House.
According to campaign filings, Ayers’ net worth is somewhere between $12 million and $54 million, money he made while consulting and managing various Republican campaigns. One of those was for Eric Greitens, who lasted 17 months as Missouri’s governor until a scandal involving allegations of assault, blackmail, and basement bondage with a mistress ended his political career.
During his time with Greitens, Ayers oversaw operations that helped Greitens rake in millions in anonymous, dark money contributions. Groups designed to hide the identities of big-money donors, from an outfit called the American Policy Coalition to a shadowy political action committee called LG PAC to the mysterious “nonprofit” A New Missouri raised and spent at least $10 million to advance Greitens’ agenda.
At least half of the over $4 million LG PAC funneled to Greitens came from a Texas nonprofit called Freedom Frontier. According to complaints filed with the IRS, Freedom Frontier both violated its status as a non-profit by funneling cash to Greitens and has apparently failed to file both its 2016 and 2017 tax returns completely or on time.
Which brings us to Nick Ayers. Ayers is currently being investigated by the Missouri Ethics Commission for conspiring to conceal the identities of big-money Greitens donors, and for arranging to move cash from the Freedom Frontier nonprofit to the LG PAC and then to Greitens, thereby both laundering the money and violating Freedom Frontier’s non-profit status. In a 2017 campaign disclosure filing, Ayers revealed that while allegedly doing all this in 2016, he was also employed by, you guessed it, Freedom Frontier itself.
After all this, we still don’t know who exactly the dark money millionaires were who wrote the checks for all this. What we do know is that Missouri’s senator-elect, Missouri’s ex-governor, and the current chief of staff for the vice president of the United States are all up to their eyeballs in alleged schemes to violate campaign finance laws, launder money, and hide the names of fat cat donors and influence peddlers.
Or, as the GOP calls it, Wednesday.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
