Missouri Governor Ramps Up Attack on Newspaper Over ‘Hacking’ Scandal

Not long after the video’s release, Uniting Missouri tweeted: “For years, the liberal media has attacked Republicans. Today, Governor Parson is fighting back, referring a reporter who invaded teachers’ confidential information for prosecution.”

Despite all this, the governor’s office has yet to make clear what it thinks Renaud and the Dispatch actually did—only stating repeatedly that the culprits took steps to “decode” information that wasn’t “freely available.” When reached via phone on Friday, Kelli Jones, Parson’s communication’s director, told Gizmodo that an investigation into the incident is “still in progress” and that “interviews are currently being conducted” by the State Highway Patrol’s Digital Forensics Investigation Unit.

It wasn’t immediately clear how to reach Uniting Missouri, as the website does not provide a contact portal or a press contact. Having watched the PAC’s video, however, I have to say that—even by political advertising’s standards—it is quite ridiculous. You can take a look and judge for yourself.

Perhaps the weirdest, most hilarious thing about the video is that it portrays Parson as some sort of protector of educators’ privacy—even though it’s the newspaper (which the video vilifies) that helped point out the data breach.

Parson has also weirdly complained that it will cost Missouri $50 million to fix the data issues uncovered by the newspaper’s investigation (that money is reportedly being spent on credit monitoring for the staff whose SS numbers were left exposed)—as if it’s the paper’s fault for writing about something that the state screwed up instead of the state’s fault for screwing it up.

Democratic politicians have also argued that the governor is inflating the costs of protecting teachers’ data. “He pulled it straight out of his ass,” state Rep. Peter Merideth recently told an outlet, in regards to Parson’s projections.