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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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Within hours Wednesday, Gov. Eric Greitens and President Donald Trump were exposed for having lied about important legal issues that could well determine their fates in office. There’s a startling similarity between these two politicians, both of whom won election by promising to shake up a corrupt political system, only to find themselves immersed in serious legal problems of their own making.
The “Thelma and Louise” analogy we invoked on Jan. 14 seems more fitting than ever because these two, like the characters in the 1991 movie, have engaged in patterns of appalling recklessness and seem deliberately to be gunning toward a political cliff. For Greitens, impeachment proceedings by the state House are almost inevitable now that the Legislature has voted to meet in special session. The president is likely to face a similar fate if an expected anti-Trump backlash puts Democrats in control of Congress after November elections.
In both cases, smart politicians undermined themselves with bone-headed decisions rooted in disregard for campaign laws coupled with a ruinous extramarital lust for women. Both insist Democrats are behind their current legal problems, which both have labeled as “witch hunts.”
In Jefferson City, a report Wednesday by the GOP-dominated House Special Investigation Committee on Oversight included a detailed timeline linking Greitens to a donors list taken without permission from a charity Greitens founded. The list was used by Greitens’ gubernatorial campaign to solicit major financial support.
The Missouri Ethics Commission investigated and obtained a written acknowledgment from Greitens that his campaign had violated campaign finance law. But the timeline makes clear that Greitens lied by underplaying what and when he knew about the donor-list transfer. It was not the act of a low-level campaign staffer, as Greitens previously asserted; it was Greitens himself who made it happen.
In Washington, Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and new member of Trump’s legal team, told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump did, in fact, reimburse the funds for a hush-money payment to a former porn star days before the 2016 presidential election. Trump had previously denied any connection to the $130,000 payment made by his then-attorney, Michael Cohen, to porn star Stormy Daniels to stop her from talking about an affair they had in 2006.
On Thursday, Trump acknowledged the payment, effectively admitting that he had previously lied. The legal strategy is to link the payment to Trump’s personal finances and thereby separate it from his campaign’s finances, where an undeclared donation could constitute a felony violation of federal campaign law.
How can elected leaders be trusted to uphold the Constitution if they lie and skirt the law for personal advancement? As much as GOP loyalists might want to stand behind Trump and Greitens, it’s time to put American democracy first instead of allowing these two to continue making a mockery of it.