Now we know why our governor showed up for jury selection last week smiling and shaking hands with law enforcement officers.
He knew his lawyers were going to easily defeat the inexperienced, first-term St. Louis City Circuit Attorney who brought against the governor a case that turned on a photograph the prosecution never had.
Today Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner had to drop a felony charge against Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens after the judge upheld a defense motion to call her as a witness, to explain her handling of the case.
My God. Talk about an embarrassment! My guess is Gardner will now join Greitens in being out of political office when her term ends in January 2021 — about the same time his term winds up.
Let’s take a closer look now at the two principals in this case and how things are stacking up for them.
A relaxed-looking Eric Greitens arrived at the St. Louis courthouse last week for the start of jury selection in a case that fell apart today.
Greitens
There’s still a chance the Missouri House will vote to impeach Greitens, but I have no confidence that “seven eminent jurists,” who would be chosen by the Missouri Senate, would throw him out of office. This state is about as red as they get, and the Senate is full of good ol’ boys from rural areas who would probably balk at the prospect of ousting a governor who remains relatively popular with Republican voters.
Today’s development does not raise Greitens’ stock with the general public, however, including, I’m sure, many Republicans who voted for him in 2016.
A Missouri House of Representatives committee report on Greitens’ “affair” with his former hairdresser shows he’s an abusive, sick and dangerous individual. You’ve heard some of the details of the report, I’m sure, but this allegation says all you need to know: Greitens, while married, forced the woman to give him a blow job when she was terrified, crying and lying on her back in the basement of his St. Louis home.
Some Casanova, eh?
Don’t you wonder about Greitens’ wife, Sheena? Very little has been written about her. Can you imagine what’s going on in her world? It must be extremely difficult for her to keep putting one foot in front of the other and trying to shield their two sons, Joshua, about 5, and Jacob, about 2, from the ear-splitting cacophony roaring about them.
Sheena Greitens is a very smart and successful person. The governor’s office website says she graduated from Stanford University and attended the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar. She earned a PhD in government from Harvard and is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri.
Sheena Greitens in her office at the University of Missouri in Feb. 2017
The Greitens were married in 2011, and four years later Eric was in the basement tying up and attacking the hairdresser, who was also married at the time.
In addition to being a cheat and an abuser, Greitens is a complete phony. Listen to what the governor’s office website says about the couple’s family life: “They enjoy spending time together as a family reading, baking cookies or being outdoors at one of Missouri’s many state parks and hiking trails.”
Really, now, wouldn’t you think somebody would have had the good sense to take that down by now?
In any event, I would be willing to bet Sheena will file for divorce within a year or so after her husband leaves office, whether that turns out to be this year, next year or 2021. Although she took a vow to stand by him “for better or worse,” she didn’t pledge to stand by the worst.
Gardner
The quote of the day goes to Rep. Kevin Engler, a Republican from Farmington, MO, who told The Star he wasn’t surprised at today’s development because Gardner “pretty well butchered it from the start.”
Gardner was elected Circuit Attorney in 2016. She handily defeated three opponents in the Democratic primary and had no opponent in the general election. Before that, she was a state representative, and earlier she spent five years as an assistant prosecutor in the Circuit Attorney’s office.
Kim Gardner with U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay, Democrat of St. Louis, on election night, August 2016
As circuit attorney, Gardner is the second most powerful elected official in St. Louis, after the mayor. She oversees dozens of assistants who handle thousands of criminal cases each year, from misdemeanors to complex homicides.
In the Greitens case, Gardner let political opportunism supersede professionalism. She jumped at Greitens like she was starving in the wilderness and he was the rabbit that came into her crosshairs.
The first mistake she made was hiring a private investigator to investigate the case instead of using the St. Louis City Police Department. It’s a lot easier to point private, contracted investigators toward the desired result than sworn and experienced law enforcement officers.
In bringing an invasion of privacy charge, she filed a list of evidence that misleadingly including the word “photo.” But it wasn’t the photo that Greitens allegedly took of the hairdresser after tying her to exercise equipment in his basement. If Gardner indeed had the photo, it would have been relatively easy to prove Greitens was guilty of invasion of privacy. Without it, though, it was going to be the hairdresser’s word against Greitens.’
Gardner should have dropped the case after realizing she had screwed it up, but I guess the prospect of personal ignominy wouldn’t allow it. All she achieved, however, was delaying the day of ignominy.
**
To sum up, it’s a sorry day in and for Missouri: We’re making headlines around the country because an incompetent prosecutor fumbled the case against a governor who almost certainly sexually assaulted a woman in his basement.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
I found it interesting (and a little troubling) to see “Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan” shadowing CA Gardner in the Star’s photo this morning. What is Mr. Sullivan’s role and who is underwriting it? I would have expected her to be surrounded by a phalanx of legal beagles from her office and even outside counsel from the state’s designated law firms. But Harvard law’s Mr. Sullivan? WTF? Could it be a past professor/student relationship with the media-savvy professor recognizing an opportunity for self-promotion in a sleaze-story gone national?
Rick — In Sunday’s paper, A-14, The Star had a graphic laying out the “key figures in the Greitens saga.” Sullivan was listed as a “consultant” to Gardner. So, she hired him to come in and help out. That’s probably money down the drain. The other key person she brought in was private investigator William Tisaby, who is alleged to have withheld evidence from the defense.
The prosecutor should be disbarred for trying to criminalize ideology (were that her only sin). But the suggestion is that the reason she did not want to testify is that her investigator has perjured himself and she has suborned that perjury.
We have reached a sad, sad point in American society where you are either prosecuted, or failed to be prosecuted, because of your ideological position.
That said, the closest thing to a hero in this story is the ex-husband. As we’ve discovered to our dismay, powerful men sexually exploiting subordinate women has become a commonplace heretofore virtually without remedy. The ex determined to make Greitens miserable for destroying his family and he has succeeded in spades. Kudos to him.
St. Louis Police are apparently investigating Tisaby, but nothing has been said yet about an investigation of Gardner. The Star editorial board could have come out of the gates first, and they did with this nonsense …
“Why the dropped invasion of privacy charge is bad news for Gov. Eric Greitens”.
I don’t know whether it’s true “we’re making headlines around the country because an incompetent prosecutor fumbled the case against a governor who almost certainly sexually assaulted a woman in his basement”, because locally the Star is painting a different picture.
Mike Round
That headline was unbelievable. Having felony charges dropped against you because the prosecutor screwed up is a bad day?!?!? Really? They must be paying those people enough to smoke some really good dope to come up with that theory.
That is a strange headline…
I would not be surprised if Gardner is disciplined. Without *the photo,* what she tried to do was akin to trying to convict someone for murder without a body or without proof that the alleged dead person ever existed in the first place.