Missouri Republican donor Sam Fox disavows Hawley, calling early support ‘my mistake’
Former U.S. Ambassador and Missouri businessman Sam Fox, an early backer of Josh Hawley, is disavowing the Republican senator, calling his previous support a mistake.
The rebuke from Fox capped a stunning 48-hour fall from grace for Hawley, who has been abandoned by one-time allies over his push to block certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory on Wednesday.
Hawley, the first senator to support an objection to the certification, pursued the futile effort even after a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted the count for hours.
On Friday, Fox joined the growing list of early Hawley supporters expressing regret they had fostered the politician’s ambition.
“Sen. Hawley engaged in an act of reckless pandering. He helped put the country on a path that has ended in five deaths and in disgrace for himself and for the nation,” Fox said in a statement to The Star. “Supporting Hawley when he ran for the Senate in 2018 was my mistake. He can certainly forget about any support from me again.”
Fox’s disavowal of Hawley follows condemnations from other high profile supporters, Joplin businessman and past Hawley mega-donor David Humphreys and former Missouri Sen. John Danforth.
Danforth, who mentored Hawley as he entered politics, called his earlier support the “biggest mistake” of his life.
Fox, who is the namesake of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, served as U.S. ambassador to Belgium from 2007 to 2009.
Danforth and Fox were two of the most outspoken figures in a public recruitment of Hawley into the 2018 Senate race against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Their support for the then-state attorney general helped push Missouri GOP Rep. Ann Wagner out of the race.
Fox wrote other Republican donors in June of 2017 and asked them to withhold their support for other candidates in order to clear a path for Hawley.
“I am writing today to alert you to what I believe may be a real opportunity for us to convince Attorney General Josh Hawley … to run for the U.S. Senate,” Fox wrote at the time, according to The Springfield News-Leader.
Hawley’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Fox’s rebuke.
His public statements have been defiant in the days since the riot as he’s railed against his publisher for canceling his book and brushed off the mounting calls for his resignation.
“I will never apologize for giving voice to the millions of Missourians and Americans who have concerns about the integrity of our elections,” Hawley said in a Thursday statement. “That’s my job, and I will keep doing it.”
But Hawley is becoming increasingly isolated on Capitol Hill as his fellow senators blame him for the siege of the Capitol.
“Who is going to join a bill with him ever again? Who is going to work with him to achieve any legislative agenda? I wouldn’t rule out being taken off committees or positions of leadership,” said a Senate GOP staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“He’s only here to self-serve and he has no interest in representing Missourians,” the staffer added.
A Washington-based Republican consultant involved in Senate races said Hawley’s Thursday evening screed against Simon & Schuster struck many in Republican circles as callous in the wake of multiple fatalities in the riot.
“Multiple people died and he didn’t say anything about that. It’s just about his political career,” the consultant said.
The consultant said that if Hawley is censured it would be a symbolic move that understates other senators’ seething anger after his actions put them in danger.
The consultant said this will impair Hawley’s ability to serve constituents and persuade other lawmakers to support his legislation.
“If somebody in Missouri calls and says, hey, we have this problem can you help us with this, I’m not sure anybody is going to pick up the phone. So he’s seriously hurt his ability to help his state,” the consultant said.
The consultant said that most conservative Republicans don’t want to “overthrow the government” and the irony of Hawley’s decision to join the effort to contest the election cost him his original base of support, wealthy GOP establishment figures, such as Fox.
“He was wearing a costume. He’s an elite,” the consultant said, noting Hawley’s degrees from Stanford and Yale Universities.
The Lincoln Project, a group formed by former Republicans to defeat President Donald Trump, launched a national ad campaign accusing Hawley of sedition Friday in an effort to prevent him from ever winning the presidency.
“A guy with his pedigree knows better, clearly knows better. He went into this process with a fundamental dishonesty: 100 % ambition and 0 % conviction,” said Reed Galen, the group’s founder who previously worked for President George W. Bush.
“He understood these people had been fired up by all this misinformation, the lies, the fiction of the voter fraud… and he went for it as these people were marching up Pennsylvania Avenue,” Galen said.
This story was originally published January 8, 2021 at 8:31 PM.
