UPDATE: Newspaper publisher connected to attorney payment in Greitens case
UPDATE, 6 P.M.: A Jefferson City-based newspaper publisher delivered one of the two five-figure payments to an attorney representing the ex-husband of Gov. Greitens’ former mistress.
Attorneys for Greitens revealed this in court on Monday, according to numerous reports. Watkins was deposed by the defense on Monday afternoon in connection to the payments.
Attorney Jim Martin said Scott Faughn, owner of The Missouri Times, delivered $50,000 to Watkins’ firm, but said that Watkins was unsure of the source of the money itself. The defense will continue its deposition of Watkins on Tuesday.
In a video posted to Twitter on Monday, Faughn said he hired Watkins for help researching a book he was writing about the 2016 gubernatorial election. Faughn never mentions the $50,000 payment in the video.
UPDATE 3:45 P.M.: The Missouri House Special Committee on Oversight will release an addendum to its original report at 4:30 p.m.
ORIGINAL STORY: Both prosecutors and defense attorneys are preparing evidence and arguments ahead of Gov. Eric Greitens’ invasion of privacy case, which is set to go to trial in two weeks.
A court hearing Monday set the stage for what is scheduled to be the last week of evidence collection in the case. Greitens is accused of taking a photo of his former mistress without her consent in 2015 while she was partially nude, then threatening to release it if she told anyone about their affair.
Attorneys for the governor said they wanted an extension of the Tuesday deadline to file motions in limine for the case. Those motions deal with pretrial matters, including requests to keep some evidence out of the trial itself. Jim Martin argued that their new depositions of several witnesses, including a scheduled interview with the mistress this week, yielded new evidence and facts.
“Things are changing every single day,” Martin said.
Assistant Circuit Attorney Robert Dierker said he wanted an opportunity to respond to the defense’s Friday request to strike witnesses from the case, including the mistress and a friend she confided in shortly after her encounter with Greitens. Judge Rex Burlison said he would rule on the issue at a hearing next Monday, along with the other pretrial motions.
Defense attorneys are also set to depose Albert Watkins, the man representing the mistress’s ex-husband. Watkins said last week that his firm received $100,000 in cash payments just after his client spoke to the media about the affair. Watkins said he did not know who the money came from, but defense attorneys argued his comments made him a witness in the case.
Watkins’ attempt to stop that deposition was denied on Monday by the state’s Eastern District Court of Appeals.
The mistress also turned over her cellphone to the defense team’s investigator Monday morning, according to her attorney Scott Simpson. The Missouri Supreme Court rejected Simpson’s request to stop the team from taking her phone. Attorneys said they want to see text messages between her and Greitens, as well as texts between her and her ex-husband.
Burlison said a retired judge, Richard Callahan, would review the extracted data from her phone, then decide which portions of the data are relevant to the case. That information will then be submitted to Burlison and both sides of the court.
