‘He only cares about himself and he has no values,’ a former friend of the Missouri Senate candidate told NR.
These days, as a candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, Eric Greitens fancies himself a “RINO” hunter. But not long ago, the former Missouri governor was not a Republican at all.
In fact, Greitens drove to the Democratic National Convention with former Missouri governor Bob Holden, a progressive Democrat, in 2008 when Barack Obama was nominated.
He then explored a run for Congress as a Democrat in early 2009 to challenge either Todd Akin or Blaine Luetkemeyer (then both representing Missouri in the U.S. House), according to sources who knew him at the time.
He reached out to Missouri Democratic Party officials and later traveled to meet with top Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee staff. However, with the tea leaves showing a tough year for Democrats, he made the decision not to run.
Will confess I didn’t see this coming when I hosted him for the day at the DCCC as he was thinking of running for Congress. https://t.co/Iph5MDdPGZ
— Travis Lowe (@travislowe) June 21, 2022
Then he ran for governor of Missouri as a Republican in 2016.
He explained his decision to jump ship from the Democratic Party in an essay for Fox News in 2015.
“[Democrats] talk a great game about helping the most vulnerable, with ideas that feel good and fashionable,” he wrote. “The problem is their ideas don’t work, and often hurt the exact people they claim to help.”
He said that, after four tours of duty as a Navy SEAL officer, he watched the Department of Veterans Affairs “fail” his friends.
“The VA was broken and my friends were suffering. And yet, time and again, the only “solution” I heard from liberals was to spend more money. It made me angry,” he wrote, later adding, “The problem is that most Democrats seem to think more money and bigger government are the solutions to virtually every single problem. They’re wrong.”
Greitens wrote at the time that all too often liberals are “world-class hypocrites.”
But those who knew him in his Democrat days say it is Greitens who has become a hypocrite, having not just made the switch from Obama-supporter to Republican, but also having recently adopted an ultra-MAGA persona as part of his political comeback attempt. He took a hiatus from politics after resigning as Missouri governor in 2018 over a scandal involving alleged sexual misconduct and campaign-finance violations.
https://twitter.com/EricGreitens/status/1538876823978713089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1538876823978713089%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fcorner%2Fthis-is-shamefully-dangerous%2F
Greitens’s hairdresser alleged in 2018 that the two had had an affair and that he had taken a nude photo of her in an effort to blackmail her into silence about the affair. She said he tied her up in his basement and took the photo for blackmail. Greitens has admitted to having the affair but denied the blackmail.
A Missouri house of representatives special committee released a report about the affair later that year, claiming that Greitens allegedly touched the hairdresser in her genital area without consent during an appointment in March 2015 shortly before the two began their affair.
Greitens’s political return was rocked by yet another scandal this year, when his ex-wife Sheena Greitens alleged in custody battle court documents that her husband was physically abusive and showed “unstable and coercive behavior.” She also claimed in an affidavit that her ex-husband has shown “physical violence toward our children, such as cuffing our then 3-year-old son across the face at the dinner table in front of me and yanking him around by his hair.”
Eric Greitens has denied the allegations, calling them “politically motivated” and saying his ex-wife has a “documented history of mental illness and emotionally abusive behavior.”
Despite recent polling ahead of the August 2 primary showing Greitens having fallen behind state attorney general Eric Schmitt and congresswoman Vicky Hartzler in the U.S. Senate race, Greitens’ former friends and acquaintances suggest he will do whatever it takes to get ahead.
One former friend, Stephen Webber, told National Review that Greitens’s switch from “total Obama fanboy” to Republican came as a complete surprise and is a clear “soulless move for political expediency.”
Webber, a former Missouri state representative and former chair of the state Democratic Party, met Greitens at Boys State in the summer of 2007 when Webber was working as a staffer at the American Legion Boys State program for high-school students. Greitens was a guest speaker.
Greitens, a former Navy SEAL, and Webber, a former Marine, quickly bonded upon realizing they had both recently returned from Iraq and had been at the Fallujah government complex during a car bombing months earlier. Greitens was one of 15 who were injured in the bombing. He later received a Purple Heart for his team’s efforts.
Webber said the pair became “best friends” and Greitens, who was older than Webber, quickly became a mentor to him and they met often to discuss politics — Democrat to Democrat.
Webber moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Democrat Claire McCaskill, who was a U.S. senator from Missouri at the time. He said he would meet up with Greitens, who was also in D.C. then, at a bar every week to check-in and chat.
They were so close, Webber said, that he was probably the second or third person to read Greitens’s proposal for his nonprofit, The Mission Continues. Greitens even offered him the role of executive director, he said.
Instead, Webber decided to run for state representative. Greitens attended Webber’s campaign kickoff and said he would help out with his campaign.
Webber says he introduced Greitens to people in Missouri politics and they stayed in touch for years. The two ultimately drifted apart and then, two years after they last spoke, Greitens announced he was running for governor – as a Republican.
Webber said he read the op-ed Greitens wrote explaining his decision to cross the aisle and was “really disappointed.”
“You don’t go from being pro-abortion rights and pro-immigration reform to being a ‘RINO hunter’ because you’re mad that the Democrats funded the VA, like that’s an insane line of logic,” he said.
Webber recalled Greitens being in favor of a number of progressive policies as a Democrat, including health care for all and finding a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
“I thought he was going to lose because I knew who he was and I kind of knew the direction the Republican Party in Missouri was going,” he said. He assumed Greitens, who was “this guy that has done refugee work and was a huge Obama fan — like he was a total Obama fanboy — and famously drove out to the DNC with Bob Holden and was always trying to get me to introduce him to Claire [McCaskill],” would run as a moderate Republican, out of step with the state party at the time.
Webber called Greitens’s political transformation “such a waste of obvious talent.”
“The conclusion I’ve come to over the years is that he’s a sociopath and that he takes his cues from everybody that’s around him and he tries to reflect back what he thinks they want to hear to be successful,” he said. “I think he’s identified a path to power and he’s relentlessly pursuing it.”
“He only cares about himself and he has no values,” he added. “He has no principles and he will sell every person out around him, if it helps advance his career. If he could become president by granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants, he would do it.”
The Greitens campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding the allegations that his political transformation was cynically motivated.
Webber is not the only figure from Greitens’s past life as a Democrat who believes the switch was disingenuous.
Jeff Smith, a former Democratic Missouri state senator and Greitens’s “lifelong acquaintance,” told National Review in a recent interview that when Smith served in the state senate working to further progressive causes from 2007 to 2009, Greitens told him he was doing good work.
Smith and Greitens played soccer against each other as boys and later attended the same Boys State program before going to college miles apart in North Carolina.
The two men again crossed paths while teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, where Smith says Greitens asked him to promote his course to students. He says when the two saw each other on campus, Greitens thanked him for “fighting for all the right things” in the state senate.
As a state senator, Smith filibustered bills that would have restricted abortion, made English the state’s official language, and prohibited illegal- immigrant college students from attending public universities in the state. Smith served in the state senate from 2007 until 2009, when he resigned and was sentenced to one year and one day in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice for impeding an investigation into his campaign for a violation of federal-election law.
“To me, it was fairly plain,” he said of the motive behind Greitens’s political change-up. “You know, he told his kindergarten teacher he was going to be president. So I think he did the same thing that a lot of people have done in southern states and Heartland States over the last 15–20 years as those states have trended red, a lot of former Democrats who were politically ambitious have shifted.”
“It doesn’t make him an evil person,” he added. “But just lays out the facts behind the change.”
Ken Harbaugh, Greitens’s former friend and the co-founder of The Mission Continues, told the St. Louis Dispatch earlier this month that he believes Greitens should drop out of the Senate race.
Harbaugh, who met Greitens on their first day at Duke, told the outlet he and Greitens had been excited about Obama’s candidacy but that he wasn’t surprised when his former friend chose to run for governor as a Republican.
“I knew he would do what he had to to give himself a chance,” Harbaugh said, adding that he and his parents donated to his campaign.
“I didn’t have $5,000 sitting around, but I believed in him,” he said. “I thought a pro-choice, pro-gay marriage governor wouldn’t be the worst thing for Missouri, even if it was a Republican.”
He told the paper he questioned Greitens when his gubernatorial campaign began sending fundraising emails that seemed to threaten liberals. Greitens told him you can’t make changes if you don’t win, he said. (For his part, Greitens’s campaign told the outlet that Harbaugh “is obviously a disturbed individual hoping to profit from his former friendship with the governor for 40 seconds of the leftist spotlight.”)
“He needs to drop out and focus on repairing the enormous damage he has done to Missouri, his family and himself,” Harbaugh told the paper. “The best thing for Eric, not to mention the country, is for him to lose. That’s the only thing that will save him.”
I have known @EricGreitens for 30 years. He is a broken man, who will do anything, including inciting violence, to regain power. He’s not the same person whose weddings I went to. Eric, drop out. Try to repair the damage you have done, to your family, your country, and yourself. pic.twitter.com/TA8DxzzSOF
— Ken Harbaugh (@Team_Harbaugh) July 6, 2022
He added: “The folks who have known him a long time are so appalled.”
Holden, the former Missouri governor, told the St. Louis Dispatch he believes Greitens has “lost his way.”
Holden said Greitens, then a motivational speaker and author, initially sought him out. While they were once so close that Greitens asked to stay at Holden’s cabin to finish writing one of his books, Holden said they haven’t spoken since Greitens told him he was planning to run for governor as a Republican. Holden told Greitens he planned to support his Democratic opponent but vowed not to speak critically of Greitens.
Now, the former Democratic governor says he’s not interested in talking to his former friend again.
“He’s tied in to the Trump values structure, which I think is detrimental to our democracy and our country. Any time that a political figure is win at all costs — no priorities, no foundation — then I think you have a real crisis in our democracy,” Holden told the paper.
“Eric comes across as whatever he thinks he needs to be to win,” he added.