In August, National Revieweditorialized that conservatives in Missouri had an easy choice in backing Josh Hawley over Kurt Schaefer in the Republican primary for attorney general. Hawley, a law professor, helped Hobby Lobby win its religious-liberty case in the Supreme Court; Schaefer, a state senator, is a champion of trial lawyers fighting tort reform.
Schaefer is now attacking Hawley for writing a legal brief making the case that the State Department should not designate the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran as a terrorist organization. The group originated on the Marxist Left and was responsible for killing U.S. citizens and helping seize the U.S. embassy in Iran in the 1970s. In more recent years it has renounced violence and worked with the U.S. against the current Iranian regime. In 2002, for example, the PMOI revealed the existence of Iran’s nuclear program. In 2012, State dropped the terrorist designation, following similar British and European decisions.
In launching his attack, Schaefer harks back to the 1970s. “Using your law license to represent a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of American servicemen is inconsistent with being the top law enforcement officer in the state of Missouri, period,” he told the Columbia Daily Tribune. The group’s more recent record is less convenient for Schaefer. So is the fact that in its campaign to be taken off the terrorist list, PMOI had the support of John Bolton, Rudolph Giuliani, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former CIA directors Jim Woolsey, Mike Hayden, and Porter Goss, and former FBI director Louis Freeh. It also had the support of several prominent Missouri Republicans: sitting senator Roy Blunt, former senator (and governor, and attorney general) John Ashcroft, and former senator and governor Kit Bond.
The Daily Tribune quoted Hawley, too: “The story here is that either he has not bothered to do the most basic legal research, or this is a political stunt. I have no idea of his motives or his thinking. I just think it is a cheap political hack move.” Seems about right.
Terrorism and the Missouri AG Race