When U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley was Missouri’s Attorney General in 2018, he should have known better than to violate the state’s open records law, according to a 2024 AG candidate.
“The Attorney General is charged with enforcing the Sunshine Law,” said Elad Gross, a constitutional attorney. “It is a basic fundamental part of our government in the state of Missouri. We need to have transparency in our government access to public records and public meetings and in this situation, Josh Hawley was using taxpayer resources to fund his run for U.S. Senate.”
Gross, who is campaigning to be elected Attorney General as a Democrat, was reacting to a court order issued by Cole County Circuit Judge Jon Beetem requiring the current Missouri Attorney General’s office to pay $242,000 in legal fees for violations that allegedly occurred under Hawley.
Hawley since has been elected to the U.S. Senate. The current AG is Andrew Bailey.
“By failing to produce the requested records, Mr. Hartman and the AGO prevented an opposing party committee from accessing documents potentially damaging to then-Attorney General Hawley’s political campaign,” Beetem stated in his ruling.
Daniel Hartman was the records custodian at the time.
"It's really unfortunate to see that his office did not follow our basic transparency rules in order to support the former Attorney General's campaign for United States Senate and it's sad to see the taxpayer money went to that," Gross told the St. Louis Record.
As previously reported in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Beetem determined in a November 2022 decision that Hawley’s AG office had violated the state’s open records laws when it did not produce documents requested by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee while Hawley was campaigning for U.S. Senate.
“The inappropriate activity here was done by Hawley and his office, and they resisted this whole process along the way and it's going to cost taxpayers more money because he was already using their money to run for office,” Gross said in an interview.
Gross previously unsuccessfully campaigned to be Missouri Attorney in 2020. He served as an assistant attorney general under Chris Koster until the end of 2016.
"Unfortunately, Senator Josh Hawley did not follow the Sunshine law while he was our Attorney General and there has not been accountability for that," Gross added. "That system of a lack of accountability is probably encouraging other folks to violate the law too because they know personally they won't be on the hook, but the state of Missouri will be or the local entity will be depending on who's violating it."