Andrew Bailey graduates from Missouri AG to Trump’s FBI. His desperation and ineptitude will fit right in.

Courtesy Missouri Attorney General’s office

Reporters at Fox News Digital were the first to report that the Trump administration named Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to the number two position at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Bailey confirmed that he will serve as the FBI’s co-deputy director alongside Dan Bongino. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed his appointment. Bailey said he is departing his position on September 8. Former U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway is the replacement.

Gov. Mike Kehoe announced Hanaway as Bailey’s replacement with kind words for both. The political gesture of proverbial baton-passing aside, Bailey and Hanaway were once at odds in litigation instigated by the AG’s office against the Grain Belt Express wind energy transmission project. Bailey sued Grain Belt, and Hanaway defended them. (It is worth noting that Grain Belt recently lost billions of dollars in U.S. Department of Energy grants thanks to the urging of Sen. Josh Hawley and AG Andrew Bailey.)

Hanaway will enter office the same day.

Bondi heralded Bailey as a “distinguished” attorney general for the state of Missouri, referring to his constant support for President Donald Trump and towing the MAGA company line.

As I’ve reported for The Pitch previously, Bailey has proven himself a partisan buffoon with glaring shortcomings in his service as the state’s chief law enforcement official. It is also emblematic of his tenure that he vacates a position he won during the 2024 election to see its fourth incoming officeholder since 2018. Bailey explained in a press release from his soon-former office, “It has been a humbling privilege to serve as the 44th Attorney General of the State of Missouri, and I am forever grateful to the people of Missouri for the opportunity to represent our state and your families.”

For many of Bailey’s critics, he is not even remotely humble for his so-called service. He’s arrogant—a sycophant to the MAGA movement who unabashedly stood to further marginalize the most at-risk groups in the state. As he ascends with an alarming amount of power entrusted to him by President Trump, Bondi, and Patel, he leaves Missouri a less safe place to live, shrouded in overt identitarianism. Critics of the outgoing attorney general, even members of the Republican Party, have accused him of unethical conduct and corruption. One example of this occurred earlier in his tenure after former Gov. Mike Parson appointed him to the role.

It’s not like expectations were high.

Courtesy Missouri Attorney General’s office

In 2023, a political action committee created to support Bailey’s 2024 election bid received a suspect political contribution of $50,000 from the parent company of the Doe Run Company, which is headquartered in St. Louis. Doe Run is a controversial lead mining operation currently engaged in litigation brought by attorneys for over 1,000 Peruvian nationals for being exposed to lethal levels of lead poisoning at a metallurgical complex in La Oroya, Peru. La Oroya is one of the most polluted places in the world due to lead exposure, and the expansive mining and metallurgy industry features.

A lawsuit was filed for the plaintiffs and is ongoing. Bailey’s office filed an amicus brief in federal court in 2023, urging the case be shifted to courts in Peru on the basis that any foreign plaintiff class would clog up the Missouri legal system. The U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals said that it supported an earlier federal district court decision that said Doe Run has no basis to dismiss the case or even shift it to a judicial setting in Peru.

It is worth noting that such a ruling remains in place today because the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Doe Run earlier this year. Again, Bailey led an amicus class of conservative states that urged the high court to review the ruling of the Eighth Circuit. Even with that $50,000 infusion of pro-Bailey campaign funding, Bailey’s office proved its ineptitude.

Bailey is responsible for legal embarrassments across the board.

His most sycophantic and embarrassing failure was when the U.S. Supreme Court, again, ruled that Bailey had no legal standing to challenge the felony convictions of President Trump levied in New York in response to the so-called hush money trial. As a reminder, a jury of twelve New Yorkers found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records in a conspiracy to cover up hush money payments to the legendary adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Bailey sued the Empire State in an attempt to force the New York Supreme Court to vacate the jury verdict against Trump. Any pre-law student worth their salt would know that Bailey has no standing due to this cool thing called state sovereignty. It was clear performative idiocy.

Bailey also engaged in a rash of psychotic culture war fights that always ended with egg on his face.

In accordance with the dominating Christian supremacy that sweeps Missouri politics, Bailey has fought tooth and nail to overturn the will of the state’s voters as it pertains to the adoption of Amendment 3. Amendment 3 was adopted by a simple majority of Missouri voters during the 2024 general election to put abortion and reproductive rights as a protected component of our state’s constitution. The Pitch received a press release from Margot Riphagen, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Rivers Action, ripping into Andrew Bailey’s obsession with overlooking the views of his own citizens.

Courtesy Missouri Attorney General’s office

“Andrew Bailey has relentlessly targeted abortion access, wasted Missourians’ hard-earned tax dollars, and infringed on their ability to access the health care they need where they live,” Riphagen shared in a press release sent to The Pitch on Friday. “Like the career politicians before him, Bailey has used the attorney general’s office to climb the political ladder to gain notoriety and a friend in the White House, while disregarding his sworn duty to protect Missouri communities from fraud and exploitation.”

Instead of accepting the will of the voters, he used his office to completely undermine the privacy and bodily autonomy rights of men and women across the state. And that is made clearer when one reviews his track record on LGBTQ+ rights and extremist campaigns focused on the erasure of trans people. A fool, having believed the highly disputed and one-sided reporting of far-right journalist Bari Weiss and a right-wing reactionary news outlet she founded and ironically named The Free Press.

Bailey latched on to the claims made by a whistleblower who told Bari Weiss’s outlet that Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital of alleged medical misconduct. Whistleblower allegations, however, were found to be completely false after an internal investigation and reporting by other news outlets, including the Missouri Independent. Bailey launched an investigation even though he initiated such an inquiry based on faulty “news” reporting by an anti-science, transphobic outlet.

Washington University later accused Bailey of illegally seeking patient records from their transgender health care center. The Missouri Merchandising Practices Act was cited by Bailey as justification to seek out these records, but that was even a stretch. And what is more ironic is that Hanaway, Bailey’s replacement, left an additional role as a member of the Washington University board of trustees to be his replacement. But, I digress. Bailey was unable to hold the Biden administration accountable in his so-called “jawboning” case, which alleged that the former president’s White House infringed on the First Amendment rights of users on social networking sites that spread pseudoscientific information about the COVID-19 pandemic by asking, not mandating, that these companies correct it with the correct information. Bailey also announced another politically-motivated campaign against left-wing media watchdog group Media Matters for America for being critical of Elon Musk’s X social network.

Bailey, again, tried to broadly apply the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, but a federal judge said that he was full of it after Media Matters sued to block his civil investigative demand. The judge in the case issued a preliminary injunction against Bailey’s investigation, noting, “The most heinous act in which a democratic government can engage is to use its law enforcement machinery for political ends.’ … That apparently is what has occurred here.”

Do you see the trend here? He sues, fails, and repeats.

One final example that shows Bailey as glaringly incompetent as he leaves his position is his attempt to require age verification for adult entertainment websites in Missouri’s digital space through regulation. Traditionally, age verification efforts have been championed by state lawmakers. But Bailey wanted to do something different, so by misusing and abusing the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act once again, he tried to force “dual level” age verification—technology that doesn’t even exist currently. The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) told him so.

I explained further in a column I wrote for The Kansas City Star in April of this year.

When Bailey’s office finally proposed the regulations for age verification to the Missouri Register, there was no mention of “dual level” age verification anywhere. To add insult to injury, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry pointed out several days ago that Bailey’s final revision of his age verification regulation wasn’t published in time for the regulation to enter force on August 30. In her role as attorney general moving forward, I am not holding my breath to see what Hanaway does on the front of age verification. She may just advance the regulation as is at a later date. But the simple fact that Bailey’s proposed “dual level” age verification plan is not even anywhere near implementation speaks to his incompetence as a lawyer and a leader.

He will fit in at the FBI, though. Like his new boss, FBI director Kash Patel, Bailey is blinded by his desire to be praised by Trump. He will do anything to receive a pathetic stroke to his already fragile ego.

Bon voyage, Andrew Bailey. May your career continue to crash and burn, even at higher levels of power.

Michael McGrady Jr is a columnist for The Pitch.