I once wrote that two moments explained Mike Parson’s tenure. Make it three

When Mike Parson left office 18 months ago, I wrote that two moments explained his six years as Missouri governor.

The first was a pandemic press briefing where a besieged Parson decided not to take questions and instead recite Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena,” casting criticism as something beneath the dignity of the person actually doing the job.

The other was his decision to turn a reporter who responsibly disclosed a state data vulnerability into a cartoon villain, demanding criminal charges even after the facts collapsed around the accusation.

Both moments revealed a governor who only seemed to enjoy the ceremony of the office and had no time for its burdens. The pattern, I argued then, was that whenever Parson faced a choice between confronting a problem and confronting the messenger, he chose the messenger.

Last week’s closeout audit of his administration supplied a third moment.

The headline finding is travel. State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick found Parson’s office spent $375,000 flying him around on state aircraft. But the flight records never explained the public purpose of the trips. For a third of those flights, auditors could not identify a state business purpose at all.

Fifty-three trips included a stop in Bolivar, where Parson lives. Eight went to Bolivar and nowhere else.
Parson’s written response to the audit did not dispute a single specific finding. Instead, he dismissed the “so-called findings” and lamented the “subjectivity” of the analysis.

Audit finds former Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s state flights often lacked a public purpose

The messenger, again. Except this time the messenger is a fellow Republican whose statewide career began when Parson appointed him treasurer in 2018.

The rest of the audit adds to the picture: improper compensatory time payments to top staff, tuition reimbursements that violated policy, other agencies’ expenses shifted onto the governor’s books and mansion food costs without clear business purposes.

The audit, though, was not really about Mike Parson’s penchant for expensive travel. It was about whether the public record can explain what the public got in return for all that travel.

That was never a question Parson welcomed.

His office spent years treating the Sunshine Law as an obstacle to be managed rather than an obligation to be met.

In 2019, it invented a theory that the First Amendment allowed blanket redactions of records — an argument so strained that Eric Schmitt, the attorney general Parson appointed, formally advised the governor’s office to knock it off. Two years later, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Parson’s office in a lawsuit alleging it stonewalled a records request with improper redactions and thousands of dollars in unauthorized attorney fees.

So it lands as something other than coincidence that among the records the audit could not locate was the office’s Sunshine Law request log — the ledger of who asked for public records and what they received.

It has plenty of company. Parson’s calendar, his office’s employee manual, its internal control plan — none of it was transferred to the State Archives as the law requires. His former staff couldn’t find them. Gov. Mike Kehoe’s staff couldn’t find them. The archivists never received them.

To reconstruct where Missouri’s governor actually flew on the taxpayer’s dime, auditors resorted to the Wayback Machine — the San Francisco nonprofit that preserves deleted web pages — because Parson’s press releases were scrubbed from the state website the moment he left office.

An administration that spent years deciding which records the public deserved to see ended by failing to preserve some of the records that mattered most.

Here is the part worth sitting with: complete records were Parson’s best defense. A calendar showing ribbon cuttings and flood briefings at the end of each flight would have answered the audit’s central question in his favor. The man in the arena could have produced the receipts from the arena.

I wrote in January 2025 that Parson’s tenure was a caretaker administration with occasional flashes of performative victimhood.

His response to Fitzpatrick’s audit is the epilogue that proves the thesis — victimhood deployed against a man he put in office, over records his own team failed to keep.

This article was originally published by Missouri Independent and is republished by MetroSTL under a Creative Commons license. The reporting is the outlet’s; please support them.