Embattled Missouri governor faces new ethics complaint

A former Missouri state Democratic Party chairman is filing an ethics complaint against Gov. Eric Greitens (R) alleging that his campaign falsely reported how it obtained a list of donors to a charity founded by Greitens.

The former party chairman, Roy Temple, requests in the complaint that the Missouri Ethics Commission refer Greitens for prosecution and make his campaign pay a fine, The Associated Press reported.

The ethics complaint amounts to another obstacle for a governor already facing an indictment for an invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking a nonconsensual photo of a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

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The charity founded by Greitens, The Mission Continues, has come under scrutiny after it was reported that the group’s donor and email lists may have been used by Greitens’s 2016 election campaign. 

Charities are prohibited from campaigning on behalf of political candidates. The Mission Continues has denied providing the campaign with the donor and email lists, according to the AP. 

The AP reported in 2016 that Greitens’s campaign had raised $2 million from donors who had previously donated to The Mission Continues.

Greitens initially denied that his campaign used the charity’s donor list, but eventually acknowledged in a settlement with the Ethics Commission that it did, in fact, use the list. The campaign called the list an “in-kind contribution” from a campaign worker who obtained it through a former employee of the charity, the AP reported. Temple is arguing that reported chain of events is false.

A lawyer for Greitens’s campaign told the AP that Temple’s latest ethics complaint was “spurious” and should be thrown out.