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Hawley, currently a U.S. senator, was Missouri’s attorney general at the time. Among the key responsibilities of that office is to enforce the state’s Sunshine Law, which governs public access to records and meetings.

Varney, who lives in Edgar Springs, was being harassed by city officials in that south-central Missouri town as she sought to use the Sunshine Law to figure out what was going on in City Hall. Things got so bad that city attorney Brandi Baird banned Varney from the public building, even when there were public meetings going on there.

Around the same time, Hawley, a Republican, had his own Sunshine Law problems. Despite being elected in large part because of the “Lock Her Up” crowd — Republicans who were angry over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server — Hawley had been engaged in similar activity. In 2017, Hawley’s campaign consultants, using private email to communicate with public employees, set up a raid on a massage parlor to portray Hawley as tough on human trafficking.

By 2019, both Varney and Hawley were wrapped up in lawsuits. Varney, since she didn’t get any help from the state, hired attorney David Roland of the to make sure she had access to City Hall. Hawley was sued by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for hiding records the committee had sought in a Sunshine Law request.

Last week, both of the lawsuits came to their inevitable conclusions. Hawley’s got the most attention, of course. He’s a sitting U.S. senator and the person who defended him in the lawsuit, current Attorney General Eric Schmitt, was just elected as Missouri’s second U.S. senator.

The two senators lost the lawsuit badly. Cole County Circuit Court Judge Jon Beetem, a fellow Republican, chided Hawley, and by inference Schmitt, for the “insincerity” of the arguments in the lawsuit. Beetem found that Hawley “deliberately withheld these documents without any plausible, lawful rationale for doing so.” He fined the attorney general’s office $12,000, the maximum possible, and ordered that it pay attorneys fees, which will be significantly higher than the fine.

It’s a stunning decision that exposes the worst kind of abuse of the public trust by a politician — hiding public records that might have had an impact on his election. “It’s cheating,” says attorney Mark Pedroli, who won the lawsuit along with the Elias Law Group.

But it’s more than that. It’s an indictment of how broken the Sunshine Law is in Missouri, primarily because the attorney general’s office has been using its power to evade the law rather than enforce it.

You can’t truly appreciate the impact of Hawley’s abuse of the law without understanding its effect on people like Varney. In Varney’s case, Phelps County Circuit Court Judge John Beger fined the city of Edgar Springs $600 and secured Varney’s access to City Hall to see and inspect public records.

“Public access to public records is not a new or novel policy for this state,” Beger wrote.

But it is often treated that way by state and county officials, as well as cities. Too many public officials believe they can get away with violating the Sunshine Law because there has not been a Missouri attorney general who would take the law seriously and bring lawsuits against government bodies on behalf of citizens. Instead, the work has been left to private attorneys.

Those attorneys include Pedroli and Roland. Also, Elad Gross, Jean Maneke, Bernie Rhodes and Joe Martineau (who represents the Post-Dispatch). These attorneys have won Sunshine Law actions in the past few years that reinforce Beger’s obvious statement. Each of those lawsuits could have been brought by the attorney general or avoided altogether if the office worked harder to enforce the law.

In that vacuum, cities and counties regularly violate the Sunshine Law with impunity.

That means citizens are often left on their own. They know nothing about the Sunshine Law until the bulldozers are in the backyard. That’s what happened to Jason Maki, who took on the city of Parkville because he couldn’t get help from Schmitt’s office after filing Sunshine Law requests that were ignored. Maki was seeking information about a proposed development near his house.

Last year, he won a $195,000 settlement from the small city northwest of Kansas City.

“It became obvious that I had to take things in my own hands,” Maki told me last year.

It is telling that Hawley, the former attorney general, was found to have deliberately withheld public records the same week Varney won her battle for records with Edgar Springs.

Such is the state of play for public accountability in Missouri. The office that is supposed to enforce the Sunshine Law is leaving citizens to go to court themselves when they get locked out of City Hall.