“What is Josh Hawley so desperate to hide that he spent nearly six figures on an elite Washington law firm to hide his emails from Missourians? This is yet another reason Missourians don’t trust Hawley, who campaigns on transparency but hides public business from the public — just like a typical, ladder-climbing politician,” said American Bridge spokesperson Joshua Karp.
Kansas City Star: Hawley campaign paid attorneys to screen Mizzou emails for public release
By Lindsay Wise | June 25, 2018
- “Republican Senate hopeful Josh Hawley paid lawyers tens of thousands of dollars from his campaign funds to review emails and other documents from his time as a University of Missouri law professor before those records could be released under the state’s Sunshine Law, according to documents obtained by The Star through an open records request.”
- “A Mizzou spokesman described Hawley’s use of outside attorneys to review the emails as ‘very rare.’ Officials at the university could not remember a time in recent history where this had been done before.”
- “The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and another Democratic group, American Bridge, submitted requests last year under Missouri’s Sunshine Law, looking for documents from Hawley as well as his wife, Erin”
- “In addition to initially asking the university to withhold those emails between Josh and Erin Hawley, the couple’s attorneys had asked the university to withhold emails related to Josh Hawley’s work for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, citing attorney-client privilege, as well as documents tied to his consulting work for an unnamed law firm and Josh and Erin Hawley’s work on an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court.”
- “‘What’s Hawley hiding?’ said David Bergstein, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. ‘He talks a lot about transparency but doesn’t want to apply the same rules to himself.'”
- “Hawley’s federal campaign committee has paid Cooper & Kirk $95,000 for legal services since he launched his Senate bid last year. The same firm represented Hawley for free in a lawsuit over a previous records request during his attorney general campaign.”
Read the full story here.
Published: Jun 26, 2018