by Jeremy Kohler

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After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from campus.

Bailey seized on the fight as evidence of what he called the Hazelwood School District’s misplaced priorities. He sent a letter to the superintendent demanding documents on the district’s diversity policies and accused leaders of “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.” Bailey argued that the district’s dispute with local police departments over its requirement that officers participate in diversity training — an impasse that resulted in some departments leaving schools without resource officers — had left students vulnerable.

In response, the school board’s attorney said Bailey had misrepresented basic facts: The district employed dozens of security guards at schools where it could not assign resource officers, and even if it did have police officers stationed at the school, those officers would not have handled an after-hours, off-campus fight. Finally, police found no evidence that race played a role in the fight.

The attorney general’s office took no further action.

“He was just trying to get attention,” said school board President Sylvester Taylor II.

The legal skirmish was the kind of publicity-getting move that defined Bailey’s two years and eight months as Missouri’s attorney general before his surprise selection last month by President Donald Trump as a co-deputy director of the FBI, according to experts who study the work of attorneys general.

As Missouri’s top law enforcement officer, Bailey repeatedly waded into fights over diversity, gender, abortion and other hot-button issues, while casting conservatives and Christians as under siege by the “woke” left.

Bailey had pledged at the start of his tenure in early 2023 not to use the state’s open public records law “as an offensive tool” to demand bulk records from school districts in broad investigations — a tactic used by his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator. Still, he made frequent use of cease-and-desist letters, warning school districts that their diversity initiatives or handling of gender and sex-education issues violated the law.

Some efforts, like his letter to the Hazelwood School District, amounted to little more than a press release. Others ended in defeat, with judges calling his arguments unpersuasive or “absurd” or, in one case, dismissing them without comment. One lawsuit, against China, ended in a judgment against the country that experts said will likely never be enforced.

Bailey, who was sworn in to the FBI position on Sept. 15, did not respond to messages left with the FBI’s press office and with James Lawson, a longtime friend who managed his attorney general campaign and served in........

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