HARTMANN Un-Hawley Alliance State Republicans fall on the sword for politicizing attorney general’s office
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e’ve got the sequel, Missouri! The Senate Republicans had barely finished tearing the U.S. Constitution into little pieces with its trial hoax. Moscow Mitch McConnell had just delivered the good news to Donald Trump’s witches that they were free to come out of hiding from Sean Hannity’s man cave and would no longer be hunted. Trump himself was fresh off delivering his illustrious “I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT!” speech (caps required by executive order). Many people had just started
saying it was much better than the Gettysburg address. All these things had just happened in real time, but our Missouri Republican politicians didn’t miss a beat in carrying on the spirit of Trumpism with our localized version of all that drama. Working off the script provided by State Auditor Nicole Galloway’s scathing audit of Sen. Josh Hawley’s previous stint as Missouri’s drive-by state attorney general, these Republicans did Dear Leader proud with their outrage over actual facts. Galloway, acting upon a 2018 referral from none other than Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, last week released an audit report finding serious fault — but no criminality — with Hawley’s misuse of his office for political purposes. Ashcroft did, of course, come to his own finding of “nothing to see here” with respect to the conduct of Hawley and his office. Notwithstanding that stunning
development, Galloway continued to go forth with a standard audit of awley and his office after Hawley left for the Senate. With no disrespect to Galloway, in ordinary times, the apparent misconduct she came across would have come and gone as a “sun rises in the east” passing news story. To be clear, Galloway’s audit uncovered damning stuff. There’s the ordinary misuse-of-statevehicle sort of thing, but Hawley appears to have done far worse in the misuse of state resources by importing out-of-state political consultants to help run the attorney general’s office and, more importantly, raise his national profile for a .S. Senate race. That assertion was consistent with what we already knew: that Hawley was preparing his Senate campaign before his parking spot was assigned in the state capitol. The Kansas City Star reported: “Whether Hawley or his staff broke the law is unclear, the report concludes, because they reg-
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ularly conducted state business off government servers through use of private email and text messaging.” So there was that. But would anyone who even casually follows state government not have expected Hawley to have used the office for political purposes? In his warped worldview, the A. .’s office was his campaign office. e is who he is. As the RFT posited last week in a scholarly legal blog post, “being a hypocrite and a narcissistic weasel is not against the law.” So the audit, while interesting enough, has no real consequence to Hawley, who now regards the Beltway as home and Missouri as the tiny farmhouse in which he grew up as a wealthy banker’s son. Were we not living on Planet Trump, that would be the end of the story. Instead, to the political good fortune of Galloway, Republicans have inexplicably decided to go full Jim Jordan by screaming at the top of the lungs that Hawley has
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