WASHINGTON • Missouri’s U.S. Senate attack ads are intensifying, with surrogate targets Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eric Greitens in the spotlight of the latest negative blasts.
A super PAC trying to turn the U.S. Senate to the Democrats launched a new ad in Missouri Tuesday that asks if “Josh Hawley is bought and paid for” after the attorney general’s office cleared the fellow Republican Greitens in a probe of the governor’s use of a text-message deleting app Confide.
Meanwhile, Hawley’s campaign for the Senate on Monday released an online ad that ties Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., with 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose recent remarks about “backward” voters who voted for President Donald Trump received widespread criticism, including from Democrats such as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.
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The anti-Hawley ad, another in a series by the Senate Majority PAC, points out that Greitens’ gubernatorial campaign donated $50,000 to Hawley’s attorney general campaign in 2016. The ad follows on Missouri Democrats’ claims that Hawley’s investigation into the case was a “sham” because investigators did not retrieve any actual messages and cleared Greitens based on interviews with his staff.
Chris Hayden, a spokesman, said the Senate Majority PAC will spend $500,000 airing the Hawley-Greitens attack ad in Missouri TV markets he would not disclose. The new round follows $1.5 million in ads the group previously ran designed to benefit McCaskill, considered one of the Senate’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents.
Missouri’s Senate race could be one of the most expensive in the country this year; both sides see it as pivotal in who controls the Senate in Trump’s third and fourth years in office.
Hayden, the Senate Majority spokesman, is familiar with Missouri, having acted as a spokesman for former Democratic Secretary of State Jason Kander in his unsuccessful campaign against Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., in 2016.
The ad claims that Hawley “came to the governor’s rescue — proclaiming him innocent” in the Confide investigation, which Hawley launched in December.
Hawley’s office last week made the chief investigator, Deputy Attorney General Darrell Moore, available to reporters to discuss why Greitens was cleared.
“If the attorney general had told me to reach a specific conclusion based on politics … I would’ve resigned,” Moore said.
“When directly asked about whether or not they had ever used Confide in violation of the governor’s own policies to discuss public policy matters that would have to be preserved, they denied it,” Moore said of Greitens’ associates. “And my assessment, based on my years of experience, is that they were telling the truth. I detected no signs of evasion, no shiftiness of eyes, no hesitation, nothing that would indicate that they were lying.”
On Monday, Hawley’s campaign released a video tying McCaskill to Hillary Clinton, pointing out that McCaskill was the first officeholder to endorse Clinton, who received only 38 percent of the vote against Trump in Missouri. The ad also shows McCaskill praising Clinton during the Democratic National Convention.
Hawley’s campaign wouldn’t disclose how much he is spending to post it. The ad starts with widely criticized remarks Clinton made in India this month in which she said her voters were “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward,” while “all that red in the middle where Trump won” was “looking backwards” and essentially stained with racism and xenophobia.
Durbin called those remarks “wrong,” saying that 30 percent of people who voted for Trump also voted for former President Barack Obama, largely because of economic insecurity.
The paid-media barrage in Missouri also has included ads from the Koch Brothers’ Americans For Prosperity. That group went on the air last month with ads critical of McCaskill’s votes against the tax cuts passed by the Republican Congress, which Trump touted in a trip to the St. Louis area last week.
A super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is also expected to advertise heavily on Hawley’s behalf. Besides Hawley, Republicans Austin Petersen, Courtland Sykes and Tony Monetti are seeking the GOP Senate nomination.