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On Friday, the day the jury was picked, , issued by Beetem, started in the courthouse. So quite deliberately, members of the staff of Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who are defending the officers accused of wrongdoing, donned their masks before the jurors walked in Monday morning to hear opening statements.

Around the same time, Schmitt, whose office is down the street, was preparing to go on Fox News to deride such mask mandates — at least when they are issued by Democrats — as “i²Ô²õ²¹²Ô¾±³Ù²â.â€� That’s what he called the new joint mask mandates issued by ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Mayor Tishaura Jones and ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ County Executive Sam Page on the same day Beetem, who like Schmitt is a Republican, issued his, and Whiteman Air Force Base in Johnson County issued a similar one. On Monday evening, Schmitt filed a lawsuit against the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ mask mandates. The lawsuit makes no mention of the others in the state.

Meanwhile, in Cole County, his employees wore their masks, as did everybody else in the courtroom as they listened to Michael Sandknop tell his story. I first wrote about Sandknop in 2015. The Army veteran who had served in the Iraq War, had received a letter from an Army Inspector General saying that his firing by a Missouri National Guard contractor in 2014 had been mishandled. But the letter raised more questions than it answered.

Sandknop enlisted me in his quest for the full report about his whistleblower complaint filed against the two officers, then-Major Tamara Spicer and Capt. John Quin, who supervised him in the Guard. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests and got stymied just as Sandknop had. Eventually, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, got involved. There was another inspector general investigation, and a report that clearly vindicated Sandknop.

The report, by Department of Defense Inspector General Glenn Fine, found that Sandknop and a colleague, Colby Powell, were illegally fired; that they had suffered through a “toxic environment.� The report said the two men deserved back pay and to be reinstated.

None of that ever happened. So, despite at least two reports and a congressional investigation backing his side of the story, Sandknop, represented by ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ attorneys Javad Khazaeli and James Wyrsch, sat on the witness stand Monday and told his story to a jury for the first time. Sandknop told of his love for the Army — he was an active-duty soldier and a reservist for 26 years — and his sense of “betrayalâ€� when the same service that he loved covered up his botched firing.

Sandknop’s obsession — his word — to seek the truth hidden in the reports the National Guard tried to bury destroyed his life, he said. “You just keep getting more and more crushed and you find out the system is one big lie.�

That last quote stuck in my head as Sandknop said it, less as it relates to his case, and more about the boss of the attorneys who were defending the case on behalf of the state of Missouri. Schmitt, who is running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, has spent much of the past year defending the “Big Lie� that former President Donald Trump actually won the election last November.

Schmitt’s office worked behind the scenes before the Jan. 6 insurrection to file frivolous legal briefs questioning the results of the election in Pennsylvania. Those briefs were laughed out of the U.S. Supreme Court. When a researcher filed a Sunshine Law request for those documents, Schmitt stymied his attempts to get to the truth. The attorney general, a former state senator from Glendale who once was respected on both sides of the aisle as a serious and reasonable man, has become a Trumpist sycophant without taking a moment to realize the real damage his actions have done to democracy.

He sues Democrats so he can get on Fox News, while people are dying of COVID-19. At the same time, his employees don masks because of a mandate issued by a Republican judge who, like Jones and Page, is worried about one thing at the moment: saving lives.

When government officials lie — whether to cover up a botched firing or to seed their own unbridled ambition — average citizens, the sort of folks who serve on juries, lose their faith in American institutions.

To restore that faith, somebody has to pay a price.