JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – The Missouri Democratic Party is requesting the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigate whether or not Republican gubernatorial candidate Eric Greitens violated federal pay-to-play laws by taking a nearly $2 million donation from the mysterious SEALs for Truth PAC.
Roy Temple, the chair of the Missouri Democratic Party, told reporters in a conference call Wednesday that within the next 24 hours they would ask the federal body that oversees the fairness of markets whether or not Greitens had illicitly taken the “dark money” donation and kept it secret in Missouri’s usually transparent system.
“In Missouri, candidates for public office can take virtually as much money as they want from whoever they want, yet Eric Greitens went to great lengths to make this $2 million contribution a secret, which raises the question: why?” Temple said. “Why did he go to such great lengths to intentionally mislead and conceal the source of this contribution?”
Temple suggested there was the “distinct possibility” that he was looking to keep the donation secret because he was “ashamed” to be taking a contribution from that person. However, he focused on the contention that it originated from a source that would be prohibited by law from doing so.
The party chairman pointed to reports from the Associated Press that suggested Greitens had used a donor list from The Mission Continues, Greitens’ charity for veterans, to bolster his campaign funds to the tune of $2 million, separate from the SEALs for Truth PAC contribution. Greitens has denied that charge. However, Temple also pointed to a report from the International Business Times that some employed in the financial sector who work with public retirement systems had donated considerable sums of money to Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates in violation of the SEC’s pay-to-play law.
Given the size of the Greitens’ donation, Temple says he wants to know if the Republican candidate has broken any laws by taking money from those same donors after coalescing those varying accounts.
“We know he has these relationships, we know that this $2 million comes from presumably someone or some people who have a strong incentive to conceal that they are giving money to Greitens because otherwise, they could just do it directly.”
Temple says the party is asking if the original source of those funds, before it was given to the SEALs for Truth PAC, came from a prohibited entity, one regulated by the SEC that has been prohibited from giving the money directly.
SEALs for Truth, American Policy Coalition and beyond
Greitens has come under fire after the money given to the SEALs for Truth PAC, a non-transparent organization in its own right, was discovered to have come from a group called the American Policy Coalition, backed by an Ohio lawyer notorious for facilitating dark money donations. SEALs for Truth treasurer, Nick Britt, went through Navy SEAL training with Greitens, and the organization has described itself as a defense fund for attacks against the Republican gubernatorial candidate.
“Over the past several months, a decorated former Navy SEAL of the highest integrity, Eric Greitens, has come under attack by status quo career politicians and other political insiders who he is challenging as a candidate for Governor of Missouri,” the group wrote in a statement in July. “As a proven leader of unwavering integrity, we cannot stand by and idly watch as one of our brothers is falsely attacked.”
For Temple, these links are troubling.
“What we have with this daisy chain of donor to American Policy [Coalition] to SEALs for Truth to Eric Greitens, you have an elaborate scheme which would have been a Wall Street financier a mob consigliere, an Enron Accountant would have been all equally proud of the great lengths they went through to conceal this,” Temple said.
“The only reason you would go through that exercise is if you were trying to conceal the initial source of the funding,” he continued.
Temple was not aware of the timetable that these investigations usually took for the SEC, but he urged them to investigate before the Nov. 8 election, which is less than two weeks away.
“If they fail to investigate whether this came from a regulated entity and it is in fact from a regulated entity, then their rules no longer have meaning because it is as simply a matter of creating a not-for-profit corporate shell and a Super PAC corporate shell and passing the money through those two entities and the pay-to-play rules fail entirely,” Temple said.
“If the pay-to-play rules are to have any meaning, they certainly could not let this stand.”
Greitens’ campaign manager Austin Chambers accused the Missouri Democratic Party of hypocrisy, pointing to the campaign’s oft-cited New York Times investigation that appears to implicate their gubernatorial candidate, Attorney General Chris Koster, in a quid pro quo scandal of his own.
“He was exposed as one of the most corrupt attorney generals in America,” Chambers said. “Today’s laughable press conference by the Missouri Democratic Party chairman is just a feeble attempt to try to steer attention away from Koster’s proven history of corruption, his close ties to Hillary Clinton who just gave him $500,000, and his failed 22-year career in politics.
“It is too little, too late.”
