Impeaching embattled Missouri governor could be an uphill legal battle

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.— Missouri lawmakers considering whether to impeach Republican Gov. Eric Greitens may first have to wrestle with an unprecedented question: Does it matter that the alleged actions occurred before he was in office?

There is no definitive answer to that question because only one Missouri executive official has ever been ousted from office following impeachment and her offense was directly related to her job.

Greitens, 44, faces a felony invasion-of-privacy indictment in St. Louis for allegedly taking and transmitting a nonconsensual photo of a partially nude woman with whom Greitens says he had a consensual affair in 2015, a year before he won election.

Separately, a special legislative committee is to recommend in the coming weeks whether to pursue Greitens' impeachment. The committee released a report last week that included testimony from the woman in which she said Greitens restrained, slapped, shoved and threatened her during a series of sexual encounters that at times left her crying and afraid.

• Missouri governor accused of unwanted sex in graphic report
• Missouri governor indicted on invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking compromising photo 

The Missouri Constitution says executive officials can be impeached "for crimes, misconduct, habitual drunkenness, willful neglect of duty, corruption in office, incompetency, or any offense involving moral turpitude or oppression in office."

"This provision can be read a couple of different ways, kind of depending upon how you construct that sentence, which I think is going to lead to a legal argument about whether or not this is an impeachable offense under the constitution," said Steve Gaw, an attorney and former Missouri House speaker who served on the state's last impeachment panel.

"It's a question that hasn't been answered by the Missouri courts," he added.

Gaw, a Democrat, was one of five lawmakers on a bipartisan committee that recommended the impeachment of Democratic Secretary of State Judi Moriarty in 1994 for the backdating of her son's candidacy filing paperwork for a state House seat. Election paperwork is a core function of the secretary of state's office, and the House impeached Moriarty on three misconduct counts. The Missouri Supreme Court, which conducted the subsequent trial, convicted her of all three and ousted her from office.

In his case, Greitens has asserted: "This was a private mistake that has nothing to do with governing."

Most of the constitution's list of impeachable offenses — such as "corruption in office" or "willful neglect of duty" — relate to the officeholder's job.

Some have suggested Greitens could be impeached for "moral turpitude." But because of the sentence structure — with an "or" at the start of the last phrase and no intervening comma — it's likely that the final words "in office" are meant to apply to the impeachable offenses of both "oppression" and "moral turpitude," said several legal experts interviewed by The Associated Press.

Yet the fact that corruption "in office" is specifically cited in the middle of the sentence likely indicates that other impeachable actions could occur outside of elected office, the legal experts said. Misconduct, for example, contains no specific limitation on occurring in office.

"That can be subject to a lot of interpretation," said Connie Murray, a Republican and retired attorney who served on the 1994 legislative impeachment panel. But "to say that he committed misconduct at some point in time that qualified for impeachment, that seems like a high bar to meet."

Attorney James Layton, a former state solicitor general who also taught state constitutional law at the University of Missouri, agreed that it would be difficult to impeach someone for misconduct that occurred before that person held office. But, he added, "I think there's a very good argument that misconduct in the process of gaining office would be grounds for impeachment."

The special House committee is to release another report in the coming weeks about allegations that Greitens wrongly obtained and used a donor list from a charity he founded to help launch the fundraising for his gubernatorial campaign in 2015. Greitens' campaign agreed to pay a small fine to the Missouri Ethics Commission last year for not originally reporting the receipt of the charity donor list.

Legal analysts interviewed by the AP, including former Missouri Chief Justice Michael Wolff, all agreed that the impeachable offense of "crimes" likely is not limited to events occurring while in office.

Greitens has repeatedly proclaimed that he expects to be acquitted during his trial on the invasion-of-privacy charge, scheduled to start May 14.

But that wouldn't necessarily prevent him from being impeached for similar allegations, and an impeachment conviction doesn't require the same high standard of proof as a criminal trial.

"It is really left to the General Assembly, rather than the courts, to define what 'crimes' means for the purposes of impeachment," Layton said.

Neil Gorsuch sides with liberals to tip decision to immigrant in Supreme Court deportation case

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WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a law subjecting immigrants to deportation for crimes of violence is unconstitutionally vague, handing the Trump administration an early defeat.

President Trump's nominee to the high court, Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined most of the liberal majority's 5-4 opinion in deciding that the law passed by Congress failed to define what would qualify as a violent crime. He based his concurrence on a similar 2015 decision written by his predecessor, Justice Antonin Scalia.

Vague laws, Gorsuch wrote, "can invite the exercise of arbitrary power ... by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up. The law before us today is such a law."

The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, was a victory for James Garcia Dimaya, whose two burglary convictions were considered violent crimes under the statute — despite not having involved violence. It was a defeat for the Justice Department, which had defended the law under both the Trump and Obama administrations.

"The void-for-vagueness doctrine, as we have called it, guarantees that ordinary people have 'fair notice' of the conduct a statute proscribes," Kagan wrote. "And the doctrine guards against arbitrary or discriminatory law enforcement by insisting that a statute provide standards to govern the actions of police officers, prosecutors, juries and judges."

The court's other four conservatives dissented in two separate opinions totaling 46 pages -- more than Kagan and Gorsuch wrote for the majority. 

"Today's holding invalidates a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act ... on which the government relies to 'ensure that dangerous criminal aliens are removed from the United States,'" Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. 

And Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the court's decision could lead to "the invalidation of scores of similarly worded state and federal statutes."

The case was carried over from the high court's 2016 term, when the justices presumably deadlocked 4-4 following Scalia's death and before Gorsuch was confirmed 14 months later. 

But if that never-confirmed split was along ideological lines — with conservative justices backing the government and liberals siding with the immigrant facing mandatory removal -- Gorsuch's addition turned out to be counterproductive.

During oral argument on the first day of the 2017 term in October, Gorsuch wondered how the court could define a crime of violence if Congress did not.

"Even when it's going to put people in prison and deprive them of liberty and result in deportation, we shouldn't expect Congress to be able to specify those who are captured by its laws?" Gorsuch asked Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler.

The vagueness doctrine is meant to apply in cases where the criminal or civil penalty is severe, and during oral argument, Justice Samuel Alito wondered how to define severity. Gorsuch had a ready answer.

"Life, liberty or property," he said. "It's right out of the text of the Due Process Clause itself."

The court's ruling followed a similar one in 2015, when Scalia wrote an 8-1 decision declaring a key section of criminal law targeting armed violence unconstitutionally vague. The clause had allowed past convictions to be treated as violent felonies if they involved "conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another."

Joshua Rosenkranz, who represented Dimaya at the high court on the 2017 term's first day in October, hailed the verdict.

"This decision is of enormous consequence, striking down a flawed law that applies in a vast range of criminal and immigration cases and which has resulted in many thousands of immigrants being deported for decades in violation of their due process rights,” he said.

Sandy Hook Parents Hit Alex Jones With Defamation Lawsuits

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Alex Jones may soon learn that maligning the parents of dead children comes with serious consequences.

Alex Jones has spent years claiming the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School ― where a shooter killed 20 small children and six adults ― was faked. He has claimed the parents of these dead children are liars and “crisis actors.”

Now, those parents are coming after him.

In a pair of lawsuits filed late Monday, the parents of two children who died in the December 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, say Jones’ repeated lies and conspiratorial ravings have led to death threats. The suits join at least two other recent cases accusing the Infowars host of defamation.

I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head.Neil Heslin, father of a 6-year-old boy killed during the Sandy Hook shooting.

Neil Heslin, the father of a 6-year-old boy killed in the shooting, and Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, who lost their own little boy, filed the suits in Austin, Texas, where Jones’ conspiracy-minded media outlet is based. Each suit is seeking more than $1 million in damages from Jones, Infowars and a related company, Free Speech Systems LLC. Infowars reporter Owen Shroyer is also named in one of the suits.

“Even after these folks had to experience this trauma, for the next five years they were tormented by Alex Jones with vicious lies about them,” Mark Bankston, the lawyer handling the cases for the parents, told HuffPost. “And these lies were meant to convince his audience that the Sandy Hook parents are frauds and have perpetrated a sinister lie on the American people.”

Bankston, of the Houston law firm Farrar & Ball, is also involved in another defamation suit against Jones, representing a man whom Infowars incorrectly identified as the Parkland, Florida, school shooter.

Infowars, Jones and Shroyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Heslin’s suit focuses on what it calls a “heartless and vile” claim of Shroyer’s: that the father lied in an interview with NBC News’ Megyn Kelly about holding his dead son’s body.

“I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head,” Heslin told Kelly in the June 2017 segment profiling Jones. 

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Neil Heslin testifies during a Senate hearing on assault weapons in February 2013.

Days after the segment aired, Shroyer told Infowars viewers that Heslin could not have held his son because victims were identified through photographs, not in person.

“That’s not something you would just misspeak on,” Shroyer said during the June 26, 2017, broadcast, which Jones himself plugged a month later.

But that claim is “manifestly false,” Heslin’s suit says: The children’s bodies were eventually turned over to their parents for their funerals.

In the other suit filed Tuesday, Pozner and De La Rosa ― whose son was the youngest victim in the shooting ― are also targeting Jones for calling them liars. 

During an April 2017 broadcast on Infowars, Jones discussed an interview De La Rosa gave to CNN’s Anderson Cooper shortly after the tragedy, and claimed the entire thing was faked.

“So here are these holier than thou people, when we question CNN, who is supposedly at the site of Sandy Hook, and they got in one shot leaves blowing, and the flowers that are around it, and you see the leaves blowing, and they go [gestures]. They glitch,” Jones said, according to a transcript quoted in the lawsuit. “They’re recycling a green-screen behind them.” 

Anyone ... who spends 15 minutes talking to one of these parents will understand immediately how vile this lie was.Mark Bankston, lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents suing Jones.

This was a lie Jones has been repeating for years. 

“Folks, we’ve got video of Anderson Cooper with clear blue-screen out there,” Jones said in 2014. “He’s not there in the town square. We got people clearly coming up and laughing and then doing the fake crying. We’ve clearly got people where it’s actors playing different parts for different people, the building bulldozed, covering up everything.”

It’s been five years since the shooting, the lawsuit says, and “Mr. Jones continues to push this sick lie about Mrs. De La Rosa and her interview.”

Infowars’ practice of disseminating outright lies has led to serious consequences for the families of the Sandy Hook victims, the lawsuit says. In June 2017, Florida woman Lucy Richards, then 57, was sentenced to five months in prison for sending threats to Pozner.

“You gonna die,” Richards told Pozner in one recorded voicemail message. “Death is coming to you real soon.”

As part of her sentence, Richards will no longer be allowed to access Infowars, according to the lawsuit.

As of Tuesday morning, Infowars still had blatantly false stories posted on its website claiming the mass shooting was a hoax. “FBI SAYS NO ONE KILLED AT SANDY HOOK,” screams one headline. 

MIKE SEGAR / REUTERS

A memorial for the Sandy Hook victims, shown days after the December 2012 shooting.

Bankston told HuffPost he has never before seen cases involving the kind of “mental anguish” these parents are experiencing.

“I think as a father, it’s a very surreal experience,” Bankston said. “Anyone, parents or not, who spends 15 minutes talking to one of these parents will understand immediately how vile this lie was, and how genuine their pain is.”

The defamation lawsuits could have devastating consequences for Jones and Infowars, especially because these are not the only ones against him. In March, the man who recorded the deadly car attack at last year’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, sued Jones for calling him a “deep state shill” and a “CIA asset” who helped organize the attack ― he’s not, and he didn’t.

And then there’s the lawsuit Bankston filed earlier this month. He’s suing on behalf of the 24-year-old man whom Infowars falsely identified as the gunman who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February.

For the Sandy Hook parents, they just want the lies to stop. Even when Jones made an assurance he’d stop talking about it, that too was a lie. During a November 2016 broadcast, Jones said that if “children were lost at Sandy Hook, my heart goes out to each and every one of those parents.”

But he didn’t stop there: “The only problem is, I’ve watched a lot of soap operas, and I’ve seen actors before. And I know when I’m watching a movie and when I’m watching something real.”

Southwest passenger hurt as engine, window damage spurs emergency landing

A Southwest Airlines plane flying from New York to Dallas had to make an emergency landing Tuesday morning in Philadelphia after one of its engines was damaged, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

"We left LaGuardia heading to Dallas, and we were west of Philly when we lost the left-side engine and diverted to Philly," said Kristopher Johnson, who told CNN he was sitting toward the front of Flight 1380.

"Shrapnel hit the window causing a serious injury. No other details about that. Several medical personnel on the flight tended to the injured passenger."

The flight-tracking site, Flightaware, confirms the Boeing 737 was over southeast Pennsylvania when it made a dramatic turn back to Philadelphia. One passenger was transported to the hospital, according to CNN affiliates.

The crew reported damage to one of the aircraft's engines as well as the fuselage and a window, the FAA said in a statement. Passengers used air stairs to disembark the aircraft, the statement said.

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Kristopher Johnson@EMMS_MrJohnson

@SouthwestAir I want to thank the crew of SWA 1380 for a great job getting us to the ground safely after losing in engine #angelsinthesky

9:14 PM - Apr 17, 2018 · Lester, PA

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"All of the sudden we heard this loud bang, rattling," Johnson said. "Felt like one of the engines went out. Oxygen masks dropped."

The plane descended precipitously, he said, but the pilot regained control and informed passengers the flight was headed to Philadelphia.

"The crew did a great job," he said.

Southwest issued a statement saying it was aware the flight was diverted to Philadelphia with 143 passengers and crew aboard and was transporting them to the terminal.

"We are in the process of gathering more information," the statement said.

Video from the scene showed the plane on the tarmac surrounded by emergency vehicles. The engine on the left wing appeared damaged.

Philadelphia International Airport said the plane landed safely. Passengers using the airport should expect delays, it said. Flights will continue to leave the Philadelphia airport, but the FAA has ordered a ground stop for all flights headed to the city, according to the airport.

Plane makes emergency landing in Philadelphia

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WATCHPlane makes emergency landing in Philadelphia

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A Southwest Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Philadelphia this morning after reported damage to an engine, the main body of the plane and a window, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.

Flight 1380 was en route from New York City's LaGuardia International Airport to Dallas Love Field when it was diverted to Philadelphia International Airport, where it landed safely, airport officials said.

Photos posted to social media showed passengers with oxygen masks, a blown out window and remains of an engine.

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Passengers aboard a Southwest Airlines flight that made an emergency landing at the Philadelphia airport, April 17, 2018.

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The engine of a Southwest Airlines plane after an emergency landing at the Philadelphia airport, April 17, 2018.

Marty Martinez

A blown out window taken from inside the Southwest Airlines plane that made an emergency landing at the Philadelphia airport, April 17, 2018.more +

Marty Martinez

Oxygen masks and a blown out window are seen from inside a Southwest Airlines plane after an emergency landing at the Philadelphia airport, April 17, 2018.more +

After the 11:20 a.m. ET landing, passengers deplaned using the built-in steps, the FAA said.

David Maialetti /The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP

A Southwest Airlines plane sits on the runway at the Philadelphia International Airport after it made an emergency landing in Philadelphia, April 17, 2018.more +

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A view out the Southwest Airlines plane that made an emergency landing in Philadelphia taken by a passenger, April. 17. 2018.

Southwest said in a statement, "The aircraft, a Boeing 737-700, has 143 Customers and five Crewmembers onboard. We are in the process of gathering more information. Safety is always our top priority at Southwest Airlines, and we are working diligently to support our Customers and Crews at this time."

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PHL Update 12:35 PM: FAA has issued ground stop for planes on the ground at other airports waiting to depart for PHL. Check flight status with your airline. Flights are departing PHL. Passengers should expect delays.

10:09 PM - Apr 17, 2018

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A Southwest Airlines plane on the tarmac at the airport in Philadelphia after making an emergency landing, April 17, 2018.

The National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA are investigating.