THE 100 REPORT
Donald Trump Jr. to Headline Bill Eigel Event, Fundraiser
With the tagline “They Can’t Arrest Us All,” Donald Trump Jr. is slated to headline a Defense of Liberty event and Sen. Bill Eigel fundraiser in December. The Defense of Liberty IX Speaker Series, hosted by Eigel and former Rep. Paul Curtman, will feature Trump Jr. as its featured guest on Dec. 3 at the St. Charles Convention Center.
A fundraiser for Eigel with Trump Jr. — who serves as the executive vice president of the Trump Organization and is former President Donald Trump’s eldest son — will precede the event.
“The Defense of Liberty events are known statewide for connecting Missouri to America’s greatest conservative leaders. Donald J. Trump Jr. will continue that tradition at Defense of Liberty IX,” Eigel told The Missouri Times.
“There are few brands in Missouri as well known as the Trump family’s,” Eigel continued. “This is the latest victory we’ve seen in the effort to get true constitutional conservatives engaged and winning in Missouri politics. The Trump ‘Make America Great Again’ message will be heard in the largest Republican county stronghold in our state right here in Saint Charles County, and I’m delighted to be one of the cohosts of the event.”
Schmitt Nabs Endorsement from Former Acting US Attorney General
Attorney General Eric Schmitt received support for his U.S. Senate bid from former Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker today. Whitaker, who briefly served in the role from late 2018 to early 2019 under the Trump administration, praised Schmitt’s support for law enforcement and “the rule of law” in his endorsement message.
“As a top law enforcement official in the Trump administration, I saw firsthand his commitment to keeping Missourians safe by taking action to fight violent crime, backing our police with resources and support, and establishing unprecedented cooperation between law enforcement agencies to protect and serve our communities,” Whitaker said. “Eric Schmitt has my full support in his campaign for U.S. Senate, and I encourage Missourians to send him there to represent law and order and conservative values.”
Parson Appoints First Assistant Attorney General Cristian M. Stevens to Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District
Today, Governor Mike Parson appointed First Assistant Attorney General Cristian M. Stevens to the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District. Mr. Stevens will fill the vacancy created by the Honorable Judge Robin Ransom’s appointment to the Missouri Supreme Court.
Cristian M. Stevens resides in the City of Kirkwood with his wife and three children and has deep generational ties to the State of Missouri. He currently serves as the First Assistant Attorney General for the State of Missouri and supervises both the civil and criminal divisions of the Missouri Attorney General’s Office. Mr. Stevens was formerly an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. He was also an Associate Attorney at the law firm of Bryan Cave and clerked for the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Mr. Stevens earned a bachelor’s degree as well as his Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri–Columbia, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Missouri Law Review.
Ashcroft Talks Election Security on “This Week in Missouri Politics”
Scott Faughn is joined by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft at Lincoln University in Jefferson City to discuss election security issues at both the national and state level.
Daily American Republic Criticizes Parson’s Response to Cyber-Security Story
Last week a PAC supporting the efforts of Governor Parson released an ad trying to change the narrative on Parson’s response to a cyber security story. Parson had falsely claimed the Department of Education was “hacked” when in reality there was a coding area revealed by the Post Dispatch that made teacher’s social security numbers easily available online. In response to Parson’s ad, the Daily American Republic wrote a seething editorial criticizing the Governor’s response. The DAR is a traditionally conservative outlet in southeast Missouri that has previously been vocally supportive of many of the Governor’s policy initiatives.
From their editorial:
This week in Missouri our governor wants to prosecute a reporter for revealing a defect in the state’s management of personal information.
When our nation was founded, the importance of a free exchange of ideas and the ability of an independent press to hold leaders accountable was so important, it was included in the First Amendment.
But it has become an all too common practice today to villainize those who question authority.
Our government, whether local, state, or federal, cannot be permitted to prosecute or attack everyone who dares question their authority.
Countries like Russia and China regularly lay charges against those individuals who try to hold leaders accountable for misdeeds and poor policy.
But our country chose 230 years ago to take a different path, to uphold freedom in all its forms, including freedom of the press.
We’re disappointed in Gov. Mike Parson’s actions this week regarding the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s reporting of a state website problem.
“The state is committed to bring to justice anyone who hacked our system and anyone who aided and abetted them to do so,” Parson said in a news conference reported on last week by the Missouri Independent.
He later argued the reporter was “attempting to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet,” the Missouri Independent shared.
The state website had posted Social Security numbers belonging to hundreds of teachers in an unsecured area.
The information was visible to anyone who understood how to read website coding, according to reporting on the matter. The Post Dispatch notified state officials of the problem and did not report on the matter until the information was removed from the site, a further attempt, according to the paper, to protect those involved.
Chris Vickery, a California-based data security expert, told the Missouri Independent in an interview last week that it appears the department of education was “publishing data that it shouldn’t have been publishing.
“That’s not a crime for the journalists discovering it,” he said. “Putting Social Security numbers within HTML, even if it’s ‘non-display rendering’ HTML, is a stupid thing for the Missouri website to do and is a type of boneheaded mistake that has been around since day one of the internet. No exploit, hacking or vulnerability is involved here.”
We have spoken several times with Parson in the past and praise his efforts to support infrastructure improvements and workforce development across the state. We know he has been instrumental in efforts that have benefited Butler County, including grant funding that is supporting the expansion of Highway 67 south as a future interstate route.
But Parson’s decision this week to call for the prosecution of the individual who reported on the data breach is politics at its worst.
Parson’s actions are more like something we would expect to hear about in a country that values freedoms less than we do in the United States.
We feel it’s important to remember the precedence this sets.
Would you rather your personal data remain visible on a state website the next time, because the reporter who might question our elected officials could face prosecution for revealing the state’s error?
We know how we would answer that question.
The Pandemic in Perpetuity
Ben Franklin’s famous remonstrance that “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” is cited regularly by critics of pandemic mandates. As is the case with most pithy quotables, this is a bit simplistic; conservatives, after all, know that order is a prerequisite to political liberty. But Franklin’s central observation gets at the serious, long-standing tension between freedom and security that has been accentuated by the politics of lockdowns, vaccine passports, and mask mandates. In jarringly Orwellian terms, some enterprising progressives have attempted to argue that security is freedom. Recall this piece, from the ACLU, which argued that “vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties” by protecting “the most vulnerable among us” and offering “the promise of restoring to all of us our most basic liberties, eventually allowing us to return safely to life as we knew it.” Others have maintained that objecting to pandemic diktats on liberty- or rights-related grounds is illegitimate: “Masks are mandatory,” Andrew Cuomo insisted last year. “You don’t have the right to infect another person.” If we squint, these debates could be seen as an interesting example of the interplay between “positive” and “negative” freedom. That concept, popularized by Isaiah Berlin’s famous work, Two Concepts of Liberty, offers a useful framework for thinking about some of the core differences in the way that the modern Left and Right think about first principles.