Missouri State Auditor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Nicole Galloway is facing a legislative review and calls for an investigation following shocking revelations that appear to show her using her taxpayer-funded office to target Republican U.S. Senator Josh Hawley.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:
The chairman of a House oversight committee says his panel will review allegations of political bias in the state audit of U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley’s former attorney general’s office. … The House review follows a call by Hawley last week for an independent investigation.
Why is Hawley calling for an investigation? An email obtained by the Missouri Attorney General’s office shows Galloway’s staff, apparently unable to find anything sufficiently damaging, attempting to manipulate the audit results:
On Twitter, Hawley published an email chain in which Pamela Allison, an audit manager, said that she would “beef up” a section of the Hawley audit that dealt with the office’s and/or Hawley’s use of “personal email/personal calendar.”
The email, Hawley said, was supposed to be shared internally among audit staff, but instead was inadvertently shared with the attorney general’s office.
In a letter to Galloway, the House oversight committee chairman stated that if true, the allegations “would constitute an extreme breach in the confidence the people of Missouri place in the role of your office.”
A series of tweets sent by Hawley along with his response to Galloway’s audit outlined several troubling indicators that politics were at play in the auditor’s office. In addition to the apparent attempt at manipulating the results, Hawley reveals that Galloway hired McCaskill’s former campaign manager as a senior employee in her office after he promoted the allegations against Hawley, that Galloway accepted campaign contributions from McCaskill while conducting the audit, and that one of the auditors in charge of the review donated to McCaskill.
“Nicole Galloway claims she is a watchdog for the taxpayers, but her record and these troubling new allegations tell a different story,” said RGA Communications Director Amelia Chassé Alcivar. “From stacking her office with Democratic Party operatives to trying to manufacture dirt on Republicans when the facts don’t fit her bias, Nicole Galloway is just another partisan politician Missouri voters can’t trust.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Missouri House Will "Look Into" Alleged Political Bias in State Audit of Hawley's Office
The chairman of a Missouri House oversight committee says his panel will review allegations of political bias in a state audit of the attorney general’s office during the time it was headed by Josh Hawley, a Republican who currently serves as the state’s junior U.S. senator.
Rep. Robert Ross, a Yukon Republican and chairman of the House Special Committee on Government Oversight, on Thursday wrote a letter to state Auditor Nicole Galloway, a Democrat, saying his committee would “look into” the claims during a hearing next Wednesday.
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Ross said that if the allegations were true, it would harm the auditor’s credibility.
“This allegation would constitute an extreme breach in the confidence the people of Missouri place in the role of your office,” he said.
