Sure, Missouri AG Andrew Bailey knows politically motivated prosecutions. He does them | Opinion

If you’re looking for America’s foremost expert on the New York legal system, you don’t have to go very far: Andrew Bailey is your man.

You know. The unelected attorney general of (checks notes) Missouri.

Granted, that doesn’t seem like the kind of credential that qualifies one to have an informed view of the way Empire State law does and should work, yet there Bailey was on Thursday morning, testifying before a Republican-controlled congressional committee about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “political prosecution of President Trump.”

His testimony was a barn-burner, as you can imagine.

“To put it plainly, the left hates President Trump more than they love this country,” Bailey said in opening remarks.

Bailey also mentioned the Jewish billionaire George Soros six times in his written remarks. So there’s that.

But to be fair, Missouri’s unelected attorney general did say one thing in the opening testimony that I thought made a great deal of sense.

Prosecutors across the have a “legal and moral duty to seek justice, act fairly, and avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” Bailey said in his written remarks. “Taken together, these admonitions explicitly forbid politically motivated prosecutions.”

And you know what? Fair.

That’s just not really how Andrew Bailey operates, is it?

Planned Parenthood, false KC Chiefs rally shooter ID

Let’s just look at his track record from the last few weeks.

This week, he went to court against Planned Parenthood, accusing the organization of trafficking minors across state lines for abortions without parental consent — all this based on a video from the right-wing hidden camera prankster group Project Veritas. There’s a problem? “There is no allegation that any child, any minor, has been taken across state lines,” Planned Parenthood’s attorney told the court.

That’s not stopping Bailey. “It is time to eradicate Planned Parenthood once and for all to end this pattern of abhorrent, unethical, and illegal behavior,” he wrote on social media.

He also went to court last week against the lefty media watchdog Media Matters. Bailey launched an investigation of the group last year after it did an expose of Nazi-themed activity on Elon Musk’s social media platform X. That expose ended up causing some advertisers to flee the site, which has become home to right-wing extremists since Musk’s purchase.

Normally, Media Matters’ activities would be protected by the First Amendment. Bailey is casting his investigation as a defense of free speech. “Radicals are attempting to kill Twitter (the pre-Musk name of X) because they cannot control it, and we are not going to let Missourians get ripped off in the process,” Bailey said in December.

And all of that came a few weeks after Bailey announced his office would defend three Republican Missouri state senators in a defamation case filed after the trio posted false allegations on X that an innocent man was responsible for the fatal shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs rally in February. That was too much even for Bailey’s patron, Gov. Mike Parson, who contends that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for the senators’ defense. “We are not gonna target innocent people in this state,” Parson said.

These are just three recent examples. There are more. And honestly, it’s amazing Bailey has time to do legal work given all his appearances on right-wing media — he’s registered hits on Fox News, The First, National Rifle Association ex-spokesperson Dana Loesch’s show and something called “The Real AF podcast” all in the last week.

It must be exhausting.

The picture that emerges — that Bailey himself energetically creates through his actions, media appearances and posts on social media — is not of an evenhanded public servant working on behalf of all Missourians.

Nah. He’s a pure partisan warrior.

Missouri’s attorney general has made it his mission to use the power of government to punish the right’s enemies and defend Republicans from the consequences of their own actions.

So Bailey might be right that “politically motivated prosecutions” are terrible. Of course they are. He’s just not the man to make the case.