U.S. Senate candidate John Wood touts himself as a sixth-generation Missourian. But does he even live in the state anymore?

Wood, whose own Missouri Bar license says he lives in Virginia, is running in Missouri as an independent in November, without the backing of a party, after only registering to vote in the state June 18, just 10 days before he announced his candidacy, and renting an apartment near the Plaza.

Nor is there any sign that Wood intends to sell the five-bedroom, seven-bath, 6,579-square-foot home worth $4 million to $5 million his family built in the Washington, D.C. suburb of McLean, Virginia just three years ago – for which they obtained a $600,000 loan from Truist Financial Corp as recently as 2020.

Before that, according to records obtained by The Heartlander, in 2009 the Woods built a five-bedroom, six-bath, 4,660-square-foot home in Arlington, Virginia, another D.C. suburb. For that, they obtained a $727,000 loan from CITImortgage Inc. in 2010.

Meanwhile, Wood’s son Connor is a member of the golf team at the exclusive K-12 “The Potomac School” in McLean – which, at $47,000 a year, costs four times as much as the University of Missouri. The young Wood played for Potomac as a freshman last year, and played in a PGA Jr. League event in Maryland as recently as July 25.

That begs the question of whether Wood will uproot his son and the rest of the family to live in 45 Madison Apartments in Kansas City – which, while billing itself as “luxury living,” features modest one-bedroom units (660 sq ft) to three-bedroom units (1,294 sq ft).

We should know the answer soon: The Potomac’s golf team begins practice Aug. 22.

Though appointed the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri back in 2007, Wood has had a series of jobs centered in Washington – including at a national law firm and under former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Sen. John Danforth and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Although a Republican in the past, Wood has done all this – fly in to rent a KC apartment and register to vote in Missouri while owning successive big homes and having a son play varsity sports at a tony prep school in Virginia – to run as an independent against the GOP’s Senate nominee and sitting Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt in the November election.

Why? Oddly enough because he claimed he thought failed GOP primary candidate Eric Greitens was too “extreme.” Yet, even with Greitens out of the race, Wood is still in.

And to do it all, he had to leave his job as senior investigative counsel for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol – which begs another question: Does he represent Missouri values, or the moderate views he claims while participating in what many believe to be a partisan and thinly veiled attempt to tar Republicans?

About the time Wood was flying in to get his foot back into Missouri in June, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich opined that the Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was a “Stalinist show trial” that “proved that the Nancy Pelosi Democrats and their Republican co-conspirators have completely lost touch with the American people.” That would include, presumably, Missourians.

“Stalin would have been proud of last night’s propaganda effort,” Gingrich wrote.

Indeed, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi undermined the very legitimacy of the Jan. 6 committee in a number of ways, respected George Washington University law professor and Obama supporter Jonathan Turley also observed at the time. Quoting Britain’s 20th century Lord Chief Justice Gordon Hewart, Turley wrote, “Justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.”

“Congress has a long history of bipartisan investigatory and select committees. Many were formed during deep political rifts,” Turley went on. “Yet, for 230 years, Congress maintained the need for bipartisan membership. … It would have been easy to stack the decks and limit the members by party on each of those committees, but past congressional leaders understood that the credibility of such investigations required balance, including opposing views.”

Pelosi, Turley noted, rushed through two Trump impeachments without an investigation – and in the second impeachment with no hearing whatsoever. “The Jan. 6 committee was similarly stripped of any pretense,” he writes. Pelosi, he noted, hand picked the token Republicans on the committee, and opposing voices were either not included or were pointedly edited out.

“It was as subtle a political move as Pelosi’s ripping up President Trump’s State of the Union speech,” Turley writes.

It begs the question why any Missouri Republican would take part in the Democrat-steered hearings.

The Heartlander reached out to the Wood campaign to ask all these questions.

“Liberals have a tall order in front of them in trying to elect John Wood to the Senate,” Gregg Keller of the Schmitt for Senate PAC told The Heartlander. “It certainly won’t be made easier by the fact that the guy isn’t even a Missourian.“