As Andrew Bailey leaves for Trump FBI, will new Missouri AG play politics? | Opinion

To a remarkable degree, Missouri’s legal community has furnished the shock troops for President Donald Trump’s MAGA revolution.

Two recent Show-Me State attorneys general — Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt — now serve in the U.S. Senate as fierce advocates for Trump and Trumpism. Former Missouri GOP chair Ed Martin is working in the Justice Department, on an apparent mission to go after the president’s ideological enemies with the long arm of the law. And the state’s former solicitor general, D. John Sauer, currently holds that same job at the federal level, representing the Trump administration before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now Andrew Bailey is joining them in Washington, D.C.

Bailey was appointed as Missouri’s attorney general in 2022, then elected to the job in his own right just last year. He has seemingly been angling for a job in the Trump administration ever since, and has finally gotten his wish: The attorney general announced Monday that he is stepping down to take a new job as co-deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On Tuesday morning, Gov. Mike Kehoe named Catherine Hanaway — a former federal prosecutor, Missouri House speaker and candidate for governor — to succeed Bailey as attorney general, making her the first woman to occupy the post.

It is difficult to wish Bailey luck in his new post. We expect that his task in the new job will be to push the legal limits of the FBI’s considerable powers in order to go after the president’s rivals and wage ideological warfare.

That is, after all, how he used his platform in Missouri.

Federal judge shut down Bailey’s probe

Bailey routinely challenged the policies of President Joe Biden’s administration in court, and made criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts a pillar of his time in office, but these stances are to be expected of any Republican attorney general these days. He really distinguished himself, though, in his ardor for using the power of the state to harass so-called “woke” businesses, and make life difficult for critics of Trump and his allies.

In 2023, he joined six other GOP attorneys general to warn big-box retailer Target that it supposedly might have run afoul of child protection laws by selling “LGBT-themed onesies, bibs, and overalls” and “swimsuits with ‘tuck-friendly construction’” during a Pride month sales campaign. That was, as we wrote at the time, a clear attempt to “intimidate Target and other companies that might choose to celebrate or even acknowledge LGBT identity.”

Later that year, Bailey went after the progressive media organization Media Matters after it published an investigation showing that Nazi-themed posts on Elon Musk’s X showed up next to advertiser posts, even publicly warning some of those advertisers — such as Apple and Disney — not to pull their business from the social media outlet. A federal judge later shut down Bailey’s investigation of Media Matters, saying the outlet was being targeted by the attorney general “not for legitimate law enforcement purposes but instead for its protected First Amendment activities.”

Bailey is not exactly a civil libertarian. He might get more than he bargained for in his new job, however.

The current deputy director — Dan Bongino, a former podcaster and successor to Rush Limbaugh on the airwaves — has reportedly run afoul of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi over differences regarding the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and its files. Agents trained to conduct high-level investigations are instead doing street patrols in Washington, D.C., as part of Trump’s militarization of the city, and other investigators have lost their jobs for their connection to Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection inquiries. Morale within the agency is reportedly low.

It is a mess. Bailey will be responsible for cleaning it up.

New AG has history of bipartisanship

It is our cautious hope that Hanaway will be an upgrade in the attorney general’s office. We endorsed her failed gubernatorial run in 2016, writing that she “knows how to compromise and get things done” and had “worked well with Democrats while pushing legislation Republicans thought important.”

That, of course, was before Trump remade the GOP in his own image. Will Hanaway continue to take a balanced, responsible approach to public service? Or will she follow the MAGA-fied path that her predecessors used to launch themselves to bigger and better things?

We will find out.

One thing is clear: It has been a long time since Missouri had an attorney general who seemed much interested in Missouri.

Neither Hawley, Schmitt nor Bailey ever spent a full term as attorney general. Each had their eyes on the national scene. Each escaped as quickly as possible. The office deserves more stability than that. And Missourians deserve an attorney general who is focused on serving them, instead of serving Donald Trump.

If Hanaway can meet that modest standard, she will be a success.