There are some Kansas City payday loan ties in the latest Greitens revelations

Yesterday, a Missouri House committee investigating Eric “The Nasty Weasel” Greitens revealed that Greitens has been trying to hide his donors’ identities since the earliest days of his campaign for Missouri governor. 

That nugget of information came from the testimony of Michael Hafner, a former Greitens campaign staffer. Greitens is currently being investigated on several fronts, ranging from the felony theft of a donor list to tying up a woman, taking a naked photo of her, calling her a “little whore,” then coercing her into giving him a blow job. Greitens apparently thinks he can just Trump these scandals out. He is probably wrong, but not yet. In the meantime, we are learning more and more about how nasty and weasel-like the Missouri governor is. 

Hafner, a longtime GOP operative, was recently subpoenaed by the Republican-led House committee investigating Greitens. From the Star: 

Hafner…told lawmakers that the governor directed him to “have conversations with donors who intended to raise significant amounts of money and … conceal the identity of those donors.”

Hafner said that at the governor’s urging, he spoke with Monu Joseph, a California-based venture capitalist who wanted to discuss how to bundle donations and conceal the identity of donors by funneling them through LLCs, according to a transcript of Hafner’s March testimony to a special House committee.

Who is this Monu Joseph? According to the Star, he’s a longtime friend of the governor who helped set up meetings between Greitens and potential donors. He also reportedly attempted to broker Greitens’ fundraising efforts with foreign nationals — a practice that would technically fall under the category of “illegal.” Hafner stated in his testimony that Joseph early on gave money to Greitens through “odd” LLCs. 

But Missouri politics is not the only swamp of which Monu Joseph appears to be a creature. I recognized his name from his involvement in Kansas City’s online payday loan industry. 

Joseph is the cofounder of a company called Emerald Crest Capital. According to court documents, Emerald Crest-related entities were in bed with eData Solutions, the local payday loan feeder company founded by Joel Tucker, brother of now-imprisoned payday mogul Scott Tucker. In 2015, eData Solutions won a $11 million judgment from LTS Management, another KC-based online payday lending company run by Del Kimball and Sam Furseth. Shortly afterward, that judgment was assigned to four companies, one of which was an Emerald Crest holding company. 

Joseph was also subpoenaed in the Federal Trade Commission’s case against CWB Services, an illegal online lending scheme run by (former) Mission Hills resident Tim Coppinger. 

Joseph was not among those whose earnings from CWB Services’ fraudulent activity was clawed back by the government. But the receiver in the case inquired about several of Joseph’s business entities, as seen below. 

Did money earned from illegal payday lending schemes find its way from Joseph-controlled LLCs into the Greitens campaign coffers? Perhaps that’s something that the House committee investigating Greitens could look into!