The old saying is true: you can indict a ham sandwich. Actually, it’s even worse: you can indict for a dream about a ham sandwich.
I wish I was kidding, but I’m not.
Here’s the story: In St. Louis, Missouri, in 2018, a man was indicted for a felony for allegedly taking a compromising photograph of his mistress. From the beginning, the details were sketchy: the woman wasn’t sure if she’d seen a flash or heard a phone click. Under cross-examination, she revealed even more uncertainty. Turns out, she’d never actually seen a phone. She’d never seen a camera. She’d never seen a photo.
Oh — and she might have dreamt the whole thing up. That’s right: when asked by the prosecutor whether she had seen a phone, she said it was something she may once have had a dream about.
As everyone reading should know by this point, the man under indictment is Eric Greitens — the sitting, popular, conservative former Navy SEAL and governor of Missouri. The prosecutor who brought the indictment is St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner — a reckless, liberal, George Soros-funded prosecutor who has made it her mission to go after law enforcement instead of criminals.
The dream is the strangest element in what has been a deeply strange case, but it’s worth underlining this issue: the allegation at the beating heart of this prosecution — that years before he took office, the governor used a phone, took a compromising photo of his mistress, and threatened her with blackmail — might all have been a dream.
It sounds like fiction. It is fact.
The woman who had the dream isn’t to blame. She didn’t initiate the prosecution. She never complained to police. She never brought charges. She never, it seems, thought much about the whole incident.
In a way, her rights have been violated during this investigation too. She was dragged into this mess against her will. Her lawyer begged for privacy when the news first broke, but the prosecutor took that away from her and brought the indictment anyway. She has now, no doubt, had to spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars dealing with the aftermath of something she never wanted in the first place.
The real villain here is the prosecutor and the political and legal professionals who have aided and abetted her. Already, I’ve covered the deeply concerning things about the prosecutor’s conduct in this case and her misbehavior in other cases. And yet, what I covered only scratches the surface. Just days ago, we learned the most shocking detail of all: in a strikingly specific note from a law enforcement whistle-blower, we find out that Kim Gardner is apparently under FBI investigation for bribery.
So just to recap for the fans at home: a Democrat prosecutor who brought a charge against a Republican governor on the basis of a dream a woman had is under FBI investigation for bribery.
There’s a word for this: Kafkaesque — meaning a situation in which an individual is trapped by bureaucracies and administrations into something so surreal and troubling and nightmarish that it boggles the mind. But I think this indictment would have made even Franz Kafka shudder.
The Greitens prosecution prompts deadly serious questions about our criminal justice system and our media and the connections between the two. Sadly, for many of us, the answers to those questions are unsurprising. We have known for years now that many in the media and in prosecutorial circles wake up every day and asks what they can do to harm conservatives and Republicans.
Every day, they put pen to paper and create falsehoods about Donald Trump, Eric Greitens, and other strong outsider-conservatives. These elements within the media treat the truth as flexible, an instrument in their quest to attack leaders, like Trump and Greitens, who want to bring badly needed change to our government.
But it goes beyond the media and their stories. Prosecutors get in on the action, too. Just as with Bob Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump, what we have in the Greitens case is a prosecutor who doesn’t have evidence of a crime. They’ve alleged a crime — and are now desperate for evidence. So they fish, they leak, they harass, they depose, they grasp.
This is not how the legal system in the United States of America is supposed to operate. The law isn’t a Swiss Army knife for politicians to go after their opponents. But unfortunately, that’s what it has become. And it has gotten to the point where good, strong leaders are being tried for “crimes” that originated in a figment of someone’s subconscious.
It’s time to stand up and fight back. Here’s what needs to be done, quickly: the Republican attorney general of Missouri, Josh Hawley, needs to call for an investigation into Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s office and practices. The combination of her failures in other cases, the ongoing FBI investigation, her obvious misconduct in the Greitens’ prosecution, and her deeply questionable fundraising make this investigation imperative. As the state’s leading law enforcement official, Attorney General Hawley must act to prevent further prosecutorial misconduct.
Following him, the Missouri Legislature needs to commence its own investigation of Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. Because this has risen to a statewide matter through the involvement of the governor, it is vital that level-headed Republican leaders in the Missouri House and Senate ask reasonable questions about why a prosecutor in their state is allowed to indict, investigate, and litigate a case that is so obviously driven by politics.
Of course, Democrats in the state House and Senate will not support such a legislative investigation. Which is why it’s a good thing that Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers in Missouri. As a co-equal branch of government, the legislature needs to make sure that public prosecutors — paid for by the tax dollars of Missourians — are not being used as political instruments.
Let the real investigating begin.
Steven B. Hantler is a retired auto industry executive and writer at Breitbart.