JEFFERSON CITY • The process of deciding whether to impeach scandal-plagued Gov. Eric Greitens will begin as early as Monday in the Missouri House of Representatives.
House Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, spent Thursday and Friday reviewing which members of the Legislature’s lower chamber would be named to a special committee to investigate the charges against the embattled chief executive.
Among those expected to sit on the panel is Rep. Jay Barnes, R-Jefferson City, who has experience as a litigator and is term-limited after this year. Others could include Rep. Robert Cornejo, R-St. Peters.
Greitens was indicted and booked Thursday on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly transmitting a non-consensual photo of a partly nude lover in March 2015.
The revelations, which have been dogging the governor for more than a month, have triggered a cascade of calls for him to resign. The governor, however, has vowed to fight the charges.
Under the impeachment process, a member of the House must file a resolution calling for an investigation.
That resolution is then referred to a committee, which will investigate and decide whether to bring articles of impeachment to the full House.
Richardson signaled in a statement Thursday that he was launching the process.
“We will begin the process of tasking a group of legislators to investigate these serious charges,” the speaker noted in a joint statement with two of his top leaders in the House.
Richardson has support in his decision from his counterpart across the Capitol Rotunda, Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard, R-Joplin.
“As a former speaker myself, I understand an investigation conducted by the Missouri House of Representatives is necessary under these serious circumstances,” Richard said Friday.
Greitens’ attorney, Edward Dowd, also expressed support for handling the matter through a special committee.
“We welcome reviewing this issue with the independent, bipartisan committee of the Missouri House of Representatives,” Dowd said. “We will work with the committee. We will be deposing witnesses and will be happy to share information with you with the court’s permission.”
It remained unclear Friday whether Greitens would agree to appear before the panel.
Depending on the outcome of the hearings, the committee could then advance articles of impeachment to the full House for a vote, in which the 163-member body — minus the five seats that are vacant — would serve as a jury.
If a majority of House members support impeachment, the matter would then go to the state Senate.
In the Senate, members would select seven judges to conduct a trial. If five of those judges concur that the governor is guilty, the governor would be removed from office and the lieutenant governor would become governor for the remainder of the term, which runs until January 2021.
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Some members of the Legislature remain hopeful that Greitens will resign, allowing the House and Senate to return to the business of approving bills and working on the budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
Rep. Jean Evans, R-Manchester, said a group of lawmakers was circulating a petition calling on Greitens to step down. She said she had not decided whether she would add her name to the list, but said the saga was increasingly distracting.
“It’s not people gossiping in the hallways,” Evans said. “It’s legitimate time constraints.”
When the House does convene a committee to investigate Greitens — the first step in the impeachment process — that will take some of the Legislature’s best minds away from other state business, she said.
“There’s only so much bandwidth that we have,” Evans said.
As an example of the distraction, Evans said she was contacted by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office on Thursday, seeking to speak with her. She said she spent a good portion of her day thinking about the request, but ultimately did not meet with prosecutors because “by the time I hit St. Louis County, the governor had been arrested.”
Greitens was elected in November 2016, winning 51 percent of the vote to defeat former Attorney General Chris Koster. As part of his campaign, Greitens touted family values.
Jack Suntrup of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.