I think you probably got it, right?:
Before Senate confirmation hearings for US Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican Senator Josh Hawley announced plans to question the US District Court judge over what he characterised as her lenient “treatment of sex offenders, especially those…
The senator, who has not served as a judge, was involved with prosecuting sex crime cases as Missouri’s attorney general from 2017 to 2019, including a case in which a county sheriff admitted to sexually abusing a woman.
His sentencing called for two years in prison. He was released on probation.
In 2018, Mr Hawley’s office was appointed to serve as special prosecutor in a sex abuse and domestic assault case involving the sheriff of Knox County.
According to a probable cause statement filed with the Knox County Circuit Clerk by a representative of then-Attorney General Hawley’s office, Robert Becker had a “violent” history with the victim, who alleged that Becker “choked” her with a shirt in December 2017.
In April 2018, the sheriff’s department searched the woman’s home. Becker accompanied the search.
While officers looked through the property, Becker stood in front of the woman while she was looking for items in a bathroom, then “removed his penis from his pants and put his penis” in the woman’s mouth without her consent, according to the complaint.
Becker resigned and was charged with a misdemeanor count of domestic assault and misdemeanor sexual abuse, crimes punishable up to one year in prison.
The case was not brought to trial. Under a plea agreement, Becker served no jail time and was placed on two years’ probation.
“There is no place for law enforcement officers who abuse their power,” Mr Hawley said in a statement at the time. “As a result of today’s plea, Mr Becker can no longer serve in any law enforcement capacity. The Knox County community is safer as a result of today’s action.”
Mr Hawley stepped down from office in January 2019 following his election to the US Senate.
His successor, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, tried to revoke Becker’s probation agreement and have him sentenced to jail for two years, after Becker was charged with illegally using a firearm to shoot quail on a highway just one week after his sentencing.
In November 2020, a judge ruled that Becker failed to complete mandatory sex offender counseling as required under his plea agreement, sentencing him to 20 days in jail.
As Missouri’s attorney general, Mr Hawley also established a Human Trafficking Task Force.
Last year, one member of the task force accused him of “putting his career before sex trafficking victims,” leveraging publicity with a focus on offenders rather than working to protect survivors, and using an “anti-trafficking platform and dedicated people as pawns to gain public recognition for himself.”
“Though we did not expect Hawley would lead every meeting, his involvement became negligible after the second time we gathered. Some of our initiatives were ignored or delayed by his absence,” Pam Hamilton wrote in a column for The Kansas City Star.
An attorney for survivors of people who claim to have been sexually abused by priests in Missouri also said Mr Hawley rejected her demands for an investigation.
“I stood outside your office with survivors of childhood sexual abuse to ask you to organize an investigation into abuses within the Catholic Church in Missouri,” attorney Nicole Gorovsky wrote in a letter to his office in August 2018.
“We asked for an investigation like the one that occurred in Pennsylvania which revealed over 300 perpetrators and likely over 1,000 victims,” she said. “You responded that you did not have the power to do such an investigation.”
But that month, Mr Hawley said he accepted an invitation from Archbishop Robert Carlson to open an investigation, saying that the church’s cooperation would allow a “thorough, fair, impartial and indeed vigorous investigation – that’s exactly what we intend to do.”
“Facts are powerful things,” he told reporters. “And what the public wants, above [all] else, is they want an accounting. They want an accounting of the facts.”
Ms Gorovsky wrote that his announcement was “exactly backward.”
“Allowing the accused wrongdoer to pick and choose what will be provided in an investigation of his wrongdoing is not an investigation at all,” she said. “It is certainly not what I was asking for as I stood outside your office … and I do not believe it is what survivors of clergy abuse want either.”
Perhaps Josh Hawley should shut his piehole?