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May 30 2018 02:04pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/us/eric-greitens-missouri-takeaways.html

Yesterday Governor Eric Greitens of Missouri resigned, capping off one shitshow of an escapade for the past few months. Today we learned that the prosecution actually made an explicit deal to drop charges in exchange for his resignation.
For a recap of the whole episode;

  • Greitens has an affair with his hair stylist, in which she was invited into his home and consented to have her hands taped to exercise rings above her head while she was naked and blindfolded in some kinky BDSM shit.
  • She accused Greitens of taking a picture of her while she was strung up, saying she heard a click and saw a flash through the blindfold, and that he blackmailed her into staying silent by threatening her with the picture.
  • The St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner brought a case against Greitens not on any sex crime or blackmail, but on "Felony invasion of privacy", a little used statute that was added into the law after a tanning salon owner took nude videos of women- it makes it a felony to knowingly photograph or film a nude person without consent in a place where they would reasonably expect privacy, and to then distribute that recording or transmit it so it could be seen on a computer.
  • The investigators never turned up any evidence that a photo exists or existed. Greiten's electronics were seized and searched, his apple cloud was searched. No photo or evidence of a deleted file was found. And the law itself was an incredible stretch to apply ot the case in the first place, because a nude person consenting to an affair cannot hold a reasonable expectation of privacy, and they didn't accuse him of transmitting the file knowingly but only of automatically backing it up in the cloud- which again, didn't actually happen.
  • An audiotape emerged of the woman confessing the affair to her husband at the time, which he recorded. In it, she admits to having a big crush on Greitens and that she willingly consented to being taped up.
  • When the case was at trial, the woman's statement was taken by an ex-FBI investigator for the prosecution. It was presented under oath by him, with him repeatedly claiming that there was no detailed records of the statement and that he did not take notes. The prosecutor made no attempt to stop this testimony or correct it. It then emerged that the interview was actually recorded on video, and the investigator was taking notes throughout it- he had blatantly lied and the prosecutor either tolerated or suborned the perjury, prosecutorial misconduct either way.
  • When the judge allowed the defense to call the prosecutor to the stand to testify to her role in the perjury, she dropped the case and ended the trial 'with intent to refile', avoiding having to give a sworn statement.
  • The same prosecutor also pursued another charge against him alongside the privacy trial, accusing him of using a charity's donor list to benefit his political campaign, saying it violated a privacy agreement in the list. This all stemmed from 2011-2012 but wasn't brought until recently, and charged him with yet another stretch- a "Computer Tampering" law for having received the list of donors from his own charity. She had previously also attempted to go after Greitens charging him with public records law a year earlier, based entirely on his use of an iPhone app that deletes texts after they're sent- the sunshine statute was woefully out of date for the modern times and applied to far more people than Greitens.
  • The St. Louis police opened a perjury investigation into the ex-FBI investigator the prosecutor had used in the trial, now ongoing. Meanwhile, the Missouri senate very slowly rolled towards impeaching Greitens as he refused to step down.
  • And that brings us to yesterday, when Greitens finally stepped down amid all the scandal, and the charges against him were suspiciously dismissed at the same time.
  • Today, we learn that the prosecutor made a written deal with Greitens to dismiss the charges against him in exchange for him resigning from office- an explicitly political quid pro quo.


so at the end of everything, any pretense of apolitical prosecution was hurled right out the window along with Greitens's political career.
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May 30 2018 02:07pm
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Greitens has an affair with his hair stylist


should be grounds for resignation there. politicians seeking to enrich themselves on the public’s dime should style their own hair
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May 30 2018 02:14pm
Quote (excellence @ May 30 2018 02:07pm)
should be grounds for resignation there. politicians seeking to enrich themselves on the public’s dime should style their own hair


minnesota's 8th kept Stewart Mills III out of office for his criminally rich haircut;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atDFkQhr5lM
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May 30 2018 02:41pm
He deserved it.
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May 30 2018 05:20pm
Conservatism breeds deviance, we all know.
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May 30 2018 06:28pm
Shouldn't have been fucking a married woman.

If she's happy to betray her husband why the fuck does any guy think she won't fuck you over too? Don't play with cheats. Simple.
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May 30 2018 06:33pm
must have been a great haircut
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May 30 2018 09:50pm
Wheres the video?
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May 30 2018 09:59pm
Quote (EndlessSky @ May 30 2018 09:50pm)
Wheres the video?


http://fox2now.com/2018/04/12/video-deposition-suddenly-turns-up-in-privacy-case-greitens-team-wants-dismissal/
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/gardner-admits-investigator-erred-in-claim-he-interviewed-greitens-ex/article_d21a7968-ad69-50c5-baf0-1e8c6f12a5b4.html
https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/12/gov-greitens-claims-prosecutor-hid-video-undermines-allegations-house-report/512548002/

Quote
Neither the video nor a full transcript of the interview it portrays has been made public


well, there are screengrabs from the video, but the 2 hour long deposition video was never made public
its questionable whether the material was exculpatory, but it was definitely suppressed and the investigator definitely perjured himself lying about a whole bunch of different aspects of the deposition.
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May 31 2018 06:32pm
Another example of the rich and powerful avoiding prosecution. I'm not satisfied with politicians simply losing their power - they need to face the law like the rest of us peasants.

It would do a lot of good for Americans to see both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump be properly prosecuted for their crimes.
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