Gov. Eric Greitens should have known to shut up. The Republican governor faces a tsunami of bad publicity over his 2015 extramarital affair with his hairdresser and ongoing inquiries into possible campaign-law violations. Late last month, he decided to fight back, launching a $50,000 radio ad campaign to let his supporters know he's not giving up.
It was the latest in a cascade of abominably bad decisions by a governor whose grip on power grows more tenuous by the day. His lawyers are fighting hard to reduce the influence that bad publicity might have on jurors when his criminal trial begins May 14 in St. Louis. Greitens is charged with invasion of privacy for allegedly photographing his lover without her consent.
His lawyers asked a Missouri House special committee to postpone issuing a report, expected this week, of its investigation into the governor's actions. On Thursday, the panel of five Republicans and two Democrats rejected the delay request.
Greitens could not credibly argue that the House panel's findings risked unfairly influencing the outcome of his trial when his radio commercials risked exactly the same thing.
"The reality is the governor spent $50,000 on (radio) commercials, he's already out there tainting the jury, so I don't see that our report coming out at this point does anything more than what he's already doing," said House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, D-Kansas City.
The ad, paid for by Greitens' campaign, says liberals are "hell-bent on stopping his conservative reforms" and that "even Satan's own lawyers from the Satanic Temple are suing Greitens." That's a reference to a group that advocates for individual religious liberty. The group says it does not believe in a literal Satan. Women associated with the organization filed suit against a Missouri abortion law that Greitens advanced during a 2017 special legislative session.
Greitens' radio ad says he "is on a conservative mission for Missouri, and he won't stop until the mission is complete." But not even Republicans on the investigations panel are buying it. The fact that they were unsympathetic to his lawyers' appeal underscores the depth of the governor's troubles.
He spent his 2016 campaign and first year in office blasting incumbent politicians as corrupt. It's now payback time.
A one-time Republican ally, Attorney General Josh Hawley, has issued a civil subpoena to Greitens related to a separate investigation into campaign irregularities involving The Mission Continues, a nonprofit Greitens founded to help veterans.
The possibility remains that Greitens could be exonerated in the St. Louis trial. But guilty or not, the taint of scandal is sticking to him. The widening distance being established by Republicans in Jefferson City makes clear they regard him more as a liability than an asset as elections approach.
