WASHINGTON
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has frequently railed against “coastal elites” in speeches. Last year, he sponsored legislation that would relocate thousands of federal workers from Washington to economically distressed areas in the heartland.
But a review of property records shows that the first-term Republican is no longer a Missouri homeowner and that he is registered to vote at his sister’s home in Ozark, Missouri, while he is in-between homes in the state.
Hawley owns a $1.3 million house in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he spends most of his time with his wife, Erin Hawley, and their three children.
Hawley’s parents, Ronald and Virginia Hawley, purchased a lot in Christian County, Missouri, in October of 2019 and added him to the deed, according to property records. But a house on the property is still under construction and Hawley isn’t residing there.
Instead, he has claimed his sister Lesley Hawley’s address in the same county as his home address and used it to vote in the 2020 election.
When Hawley took office in January of 2019, he said he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch he would split time between the Springfield area and the Washington suburbs.
Hawley lived in Columbia during his stint as a professor at the University of Missouri Law School and two years as Missouri attorney general. But in March of 2019 the couple sold the Columbia home, according to the Boone County Recorder of Deeds.
That same month Hawley and his wife were added as co-owners to his parents’ home in Springfield, according to the Greene County Recorder’s Office. That property was sold in June.
A little more than a month after the sale of the Springfield property, Hawley changed his voter registration address to his sister’s home in Ozark. He is also using the Ozark address for his registration with the Missouri Bar.
Records from the Christian County Collector’s Office show Lesley Hawley, a dermatologist, has paid the property tax bill for the four-bedroom Ozark home since 2018.
Hawley’s office did not answer questions about whether the senator is paying his sister rent, how many nights he has stayed at the Ozark property or his decision to use the address for his voter registration. Nor did the office offer a timetable for completion of Hawley’s new Christian County home.
In a statement, Hawley spokeswoman Kelli Ford criticized The Star for asking about the senator’s registration and attacked a Democratic-aligned group that recently raised the issue.
“Josh and Erin sold their home in Springfield earlier this year to build a new one in Ozark, Missouri, and are staying down the street with family in Ozark while it’s finished. We realize Ozark may not be ritzy, but it suits Josh and Erin just fine,” Ford said.
The Congressional Integrity Project, a Democratic-aligned group that investigates Republican senators, alleged in an October report that Hawley’s decision to register at his sister’s home could be a potential violation of Missouri’s voter registration law, which requires voters to register at their residence.
“Along with misleading his constituents about where he really lives, Hawley is possibly breaking the law,” the Democratic group said.
On Twitter Wednesday afternoon, Hawley posted a photo of the house under construction and linked questions about his residency to a Tuesday hearing on the tech industry, which took place weeks after the project released its report.
“One day after I exposed more liberal #BigTech censorship, some George Soros Democrat group is attacking me for - wait for it - building a new home in Ozark, MO. House is coming along great! We love Ozark. Dem losers, thanks for playing,” Hawley said on Twitter.
Kansas Republican Rep. Steve Watkins faces prosecution in Shawnee County after using the address of a Topeka UPS store on his voter registration and allegedly voting in the wrong city council district in 2019.
But Hawley’s use of a family member’s home is unlikely to create the same legal problems, according to Missouri attorneys who specialize in election law.
“Residency is where you want to be, not where you are,” said Chuck Hatfield, a Jefferson City attorney whose past clients include Hawley’s 2018 opponent, former Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill.
“It’s kind of circular. What does it mean to be a resident? It’s not very well-defined and the courts have been pretty darn lenient… I can’t imagine a scenario where Josh is in violation of the state law,” Hatfield said.
Hawley’s residency is likely to be more a political issue than legal one, especially as his national profile continues to grow ahead of 2024, when he could either run for president or a second term in the Senate.
Maintaining two homes, one in-state and another in Washington, among the most expensive metro areas in the world, often puts a financial strain on new lawmakers.
While affluent compared to the average American, Hawley is on the low end of the wealth spectrum in the U.S. Senate, a chamber full of multimillionaires.
When he was elected in 2018 his assets were estimated at between $500,000 and $1.7 million with between $250,000 and $500,000 in liabilities, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The financial disclosure Hawley filed with the Senate covering the 2019 tax year does not list any real estate holdings as assets, but it does list three mortgages as liabilities, including one tied to the Columbia house that was sold in 2019 and paid off.
Other senators from the region have faced questions about where they call home.
Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, who spends most of his personal time in Alexandria, Virginia, ran into trouble during his 2014 re-election campaign when it was revealed that he rented out his Dodge City property and was no longer maintaining a home in Kansas. Instead, he was registered at a friend’s address.
“I have full access to the recliner,” Roberts told The New York Times, a quip that haunted him throughout the hotly contested primary and the general election.
Hawley used a similar line of attack against McCaskill in 2018, claiming that she had “drifted away from Missouri” and pointing to her real estate holdings as evidence.
“She flies over us in her private plane, from family vacations with Chuck Schumer, to Hollywood fundraisers with Barack Obama, to her luxury condo in D.C. Claire McCaskill is just another Washington liberal,” Hawley said in a statement two months before the election.
Hawley overcame his own residency controversy in 2018 when McCaskill and others accused him of flouting a state law requiring the attorney general to reside in Jefferson City.
Roberts and McCaskill are creatures of a different era in Washington, where lawmakers spent extended periods of time in the city and formed friendships that facilitated bipartisan deal-making.
Hawley, on the other hand, has framed himself as an outspoken critic of Washington elites.
“The message that Washington has sent our whole society is loud and clear: our elites are the people who matter—and those who aspire to join them,” Hawley said in his first major speech on the Senate floor in 2019.
“Everyone else is pathetic or backwards. And millions of Americans are left with the sense that the people who run this country view them with nothing but contempt and value them as nothing but consumers.”
Hawley returned to this theme in the fall of 2019 when he proposed relocating 10 federal agencies, including the Department of Commerce the Department of Energy, to the heartland.
“It’s such an insular place and people forget that there’s a vast country out there and there’s lots of places in the country that aren’t like D.C. and haven’t seen gobs of money poured in.”
Laura Dodson, the head of the union that represents employees at the USDA’s Economic Research Service, many of whom were relocated to Kansas City last year, said that Hawley’s past comments about Washington-based federal workers appear to conflict with his own choices.
“I think Hawley has found like a lot of us have found that D.C. is a wonderful place to be,” said Dodson, who was among a handful of ERS employees who remained in Washington when the agency relocated its headquarters to Kansas City against opposition from the union.
“There is a true irony lauding the Midwest but also distancing yourself physically from it as much as you can.”
The Kansas City Star’s Jonathan Shorman contributed to this report.
This story was originally published November 18, 2020 3:55 PM.
