JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. _ Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens has been served a subpoena by state Attorney General Josh Hawley as part of his investigation into the governor's use of the resources of a veterans charity for his 2016 gubernatorial campaign
"We have issued a civil subpoena to the Greitens Group," said Mary Compton, Hawley's press secretary. "Eric Greitens is the registered agent for the Greitens Group, and Eric Greitens has accepted service of the subpoena through his counsel."
Greitens' attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Issues surrounding the Greitens campaign's use of a donor list belonging to The Mission Continues have dogged the governor since shortly before the 2016 election.
Greitens founded The Mission Continues in 2007, and when first confronted by The Associated Press with evidence that his campaign used its donor list to raise money he flatly denied it.
After a complaint was filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission, Greitens and his attorney signed a consent decree last year attesting that the list was given to his campaign in March 2015 as an in-kind donation from Daniel Laub, his campaign manager.
Yet The Mission Continues has been adamant that it did not _ and would not _ give Greitens' campaign or any campaign its donor list. Doing so could violate federal law and put the charity's tax-exempt status at risk. The charity has been equally unwavering in saying that it doesn't even know who Daniel Laub is.
Experts in nonprofit law previously told The Kansas City Star that if someone took the list from the charity without permission and used it for personal or political purposes, that could be considered theft or embezzlement.
The Star reported in February that a former Greitens campaign aide at the center of questions surrounding the donor list was talking to the St. Louis prosecutor's office as part of its criminal investigation of the governor. A grand jury indicted Greitens in February on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge related to an extramarital affair in 2015. The indictment alleges Greitens took a nonconsensual photo of the partially nude woman with whom he was having the affair.
In addition to the donor list, Greitens is also accused of using the charity's email list for political purposes.
New York Times reporter Ben Casselman has said that after he donated to The Mission Continues in 2012, he began getting campaign-related emails from Greitens. His experience is similar to that of another source who provided The Star emails showing he had signed up for email updates from The Mission Continues in 2010, and then began getting fundraising emails from the Greitens campaign in 2015.
Hawley said last month that he would be willing to go to court to fight any assertion of executive privilege by Greitens to contest a subpoena and get out of answering questions from the attorney general's office.
