Jason Hancock, Missouri Independent

Former Missouri House Speaker John Diehl was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison Monday after pleading guilty last year to misusing federal loans meant to help businesses withstand the COVID-19 pandemic.

Diehl, a St. Louis-area attorney, admitted defrauding the U.S. Small Business Administration out of $379,900 through an Economic Injury Disaster Loan and a later loan modification obtained through false representations.

His attorneys asked the court last month for a non-custodial sentence, arguing in part that he repaid the money. Prosecutors pushed back on that argument, saying repayment should not be treated as an “extraordinary” basis for leniency because Diehl is a “man of great and substantial means.”...

There is a familiar Washington magic trick, and Missouri’s U.S. senators perform it with unusual confidence: Spend years denouncing the bipartisan cult of stupid wars, then salute smartly when your own president lights the fuse.

Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt have both marketed themselves as realists, skeptics of permanent intervention and the old foreign-policy catechism. Hawley said in 2019 that the point of American foreign policy is “not to remake the world,” and in 2023 said flatly that “regime change didn’t work.” Schmitt built a parallel brand in softer packaging, attacking the “failed Washington way” on foreign policy, repeatedly calling Donald Trump the “peace president” and insisting he did not want “a forever war in the Middle East.”

And then came Iran, the moment when rhetoric had to cash out and both men opposed the effort to reassert congressional authority over war powers....

When the FBI carried out its controversial raid last month at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, it was already guaranteed to inflame partisan tensions.

What made the episode more striking was the presence of Andrew Bailey.

The former Missouri attorney general is now co-deputy director of the FBI. He traveled to Georgia to oversee an operation tied to claims about the 2020 election that have been repeatedly debunked and exhaustively litigated....

Missouri Republicans have been doing everything they can to block a referendum to put the state’s gerrymandered congressional map on the 2026 ballot. The latest twist came late last month when Attorney General Catherine Hanaway accused a company hired to collect signatures for the campaign of human trafficking.

You read that right: Human trafficking.

If true, it would be a massive scandal — and a grave tragedy. But so far, the only evidence Hanaway has cited are “reports.”...

In American politics, we’re familiar with gerrymandering — when a political party redraws district lines to gain an electoral advantage.

But what happens when that plan backfires and accidentally benefits the opposing party instead? Enter what politicos call the “dummymander.”

Republicans in several states, including Missouri, followed President Donald Trump’s orders to redraw congressional maps to protect the GOP’s House majority. To do it, they carved up blue seats and dispersed those Democratic voters into deep red districts, making many hue more towards pink....