Missouri prosecutor declines to charge St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Parson targeted

A Missouri prosecutor won’t charge a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist whom Gov. Mike Parson targeted for a criminal investigation after he revealed a data flaw in a state website that left 100,000 teachers’ Social Security numbers vulnerable.

Cole County prosecutor Locke Thompson said in a news release that “it is not in the best interest of Cole County citizens to utilize the significant resources and taxpayer dollars that would be necessary to pursue misdemeanor criminal charges in this case.”

Thompson, a Republican, had been reviewing the case since late December after a Missouri State Highway Patrol investigation. The reporter, Josh Renaud, released a personal statement late Friday.

“This decision is a relief,” Renaud wrote. “But it does not repair the harm done to me and my family. My actions were entirely legal and consistent with established journalistic principles.”

He added, “This was a political persecution of a journalist, plain and simple.”

Renaud last October found more than 100,000 Social Security numbers of teachers and other state education department employees could have been publicly accessible because of a vulnerability on a website maintained by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

The Social Security numbers, the Post-Dispatch reported, had been exposed in the HTML source code of a state website, which anyone can access through a web browser with a few key strokes. Renaud notified DESE of the flaw and withheld publication of the story about it until the database was taken offline.

The next day, Parson held a press conference labeling the reporter a “hacker” and, in an extraordinary decision, referred him for a criminal investigation.

The revelation of the security flaw led DESE to spend $800,000 to offer credit monitoring to teachers whose personal information was left vulnerable. The department had planned to thank the Post-Dispatch before the governor’s office intervened, the newspaper later reported.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch President and Publisher Ian Caso said in a statement Friday that the newspaper was pleased to learn no criminal charges will be pursued. He also called the governor’s accusations “unfounded” and aimed toward deflecting embarrassment “for the state’s failures.”

“This matter should have never gone beyond the state’s initial, intended response, which was to thank the reporter for the responsible way he handled the situation,” Caso said. “Instead, too much taxpayer money has been wasted in a politically-motivated investigation.”

The prosecutor’s decision brings to an end one of Parson’s most far-reaching public outbursts.

Though he had previously lashed out at journalists for critical reporting of his administration’s COVID-19 response, calling for a criminal investigation of Renaud marked a new low in his relationship with the press and was widely panned by cybersecurity experts. Virtually no Missouri Republican politicians came to his defense.

Renaud wrote that he hoped Parson would “redeem” the situation by apologizing, noting the governor’s scathing statement last week after hard-right conservative senators and anti-vaccine activists forced the ouster of the state health director.

“More care was given to political gain than the harm caused to a man and his family,” Parson said then.

Renaud said the words applied equally to Parson’s treatment of him, and called the investigation “one of the most difficult seasons” of a 20-year career in journalism.

“The investigation has run its course,” he wrote. “So now I pray Gov. Parson’s eyes will be opened, that he will see the harm he did to me and my family, that he will apologize, and that he will show Missourians a better way.”

Parson has all but refused. In a statement, his spokeswoman Kelli Jones continued to call Renaud’s reporting “the hacking of Missouri teachers’ personally identifiable information” and a “clear violation” of the state’s computer tampering statutes.

“The state did its part by investigating and presenting its findings to the Cole County Prosecutor, who has elected not to press charges, as is his prerogative,” she said.

Thompson said that “there is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law,” but said upon reviewing the case file, “the issues at the heart of the investigation have been resolved through non-legal means.”

This story was originally published February 11, 2022 at 7:39 PM.