Report Out on Former St Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner Is As Bad As You'd Imagine

(AP Photo/Jim Salter)

Even allowing for the fact that when it comes to the Soros supported Ms Gardner, I can imagine an awful lot of awful.

If “Kim Gardner” rings a tiny bell but you can’t quite put a finger on it, I am sure your memory will be refreshed the second you see this June 2020 video. It was taken during the BLM fiery-but-peaceful riot summer, and in St, Louis specifically, where some of the most tragic looting, burning and murderous behavior happened.

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The city was ablaze with out of control destruction and violence proving how much black lives mattered.

…After George Floyd’s deadly encounter with police, pro-BLM rioters destroyed and burned businesses in St. Louis. Additionally, four police officers were shot and a retired police captain – David Dorn – was killed.

It was within the backdrop of the ongoing rioting that the St. Louis couple stood outside their homes, brandished weapons and waved them at BLM protesters who broke through an iron gate, ignored a “No Trespassing” sign, and screamed threats of arson and rape at them, the McCloskeys said. Protest leaders counter-claimed that the march was peaceful, and no threats were made.

“We knew that when we saw the video [of the clash with BLM]… that it was too big of an event for the left to avoid punishing us for it.”

And Mark McCloskey, the St Louis attorney seen with his wife protecting their home from the crowd breaking through the locked gate onto private property, was correct. There was no way radical leftist Kim Gardner, Circuit Attorney of St Louis, was going to let rich, white folks get away with facing down a mob literally on their doorstep.

…The McCloskeys were both charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon by DA Gardner, who is currently facing pressure to resign. In contrast, nine BLM protesters outside the McCloskey home were charged with misdemeanor trespassing, which prosecutors later dropped.

“In our case, we were [considered by Gardner] the worst criminals in St. Louis – despite the 262 murders we had in 2020 – by standing on our front porch and defending ourselves. We got leapfrogged over 6,000 other cases, other serious felonies,” Mark said.

The McCloskeys might well still be in a heap of liberal legal hot water had it not been for a serious error of arrogant judgement by Garner. If this sounds familiar again, it seems to be a theme with these types. Gardner used the McCloskey case in her email solicitations for fundraising. That was a bridge-to-a-fair-trial too far. A St. Louis judge threw her and her office off the case six months later.

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…A St. Louis judge has disqualified Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner and her office from prosecuting Mark McCloskey’s case, saying campaign fundraising emails she sent before and after issuing charges against the couple “raise the appearance of impropriety and jeopardize the defendant’s right to a fair trial.”

The McCloskeys would eventually plead to misdemeanors, perform community service, and are free to practice law again after a probationary period. In the interim, while Gardner could do nothing to them, she was still doing nothing for St. Louis either, and calls were growing for the Gardner to step down.

…Mark and Patricia both support Gardner’s removal from office as she faces pressure to resign, calling St. Louis a “war zone” under her watch. “The office is bizarrely, intentionally – in my opinion – [involved in] malpractice,” Mark said.

Missouri’s Attorney General, fully supportive of efforts to remove the embattled prosecutor, filed a lawsuit this past spring to retrieve documents from the DAs office to bolster the investigation for that removal. At the same time, the MO legislature was moving forward on a bill to “strip her office of power.” In May, under intense pressure and in a desperate CYA move, Gardner resigned.

Attorney Kim Gardner, a reform-minded prosecutor who was first elected in 2016 and again by an overwhelming majority in 2020, announced Thursday that she would resign following threats from the Missouri state legislature to pass a bill stripping her office of power.

Missouri Republicans ramped up efforts this week to advance the bill, which would allow the governor to appoint a special prosecutor in any jurisdiction to handle cases said to include a “threat to public safety.”

But don’t think that was the end of it. MO AG Andrew Bailey just released the report compiled from the documents he received from Gardner’s office, dozens of witness interviews, etc, and HO-LEE-SMOKES. That worthless chica should have been cashiered ages ago.

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25,000 cases dismissed.

2,735 cases dismissed by judges for failure to prosecute.

$351,500 in taxpayer money paid to an unlicensed attorney providing legal advice.

Countless violations of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

A resignation just hours before a judge was to order potentially damaging records be turned over and a deposition be scheduled.

Did the good people of St. Louis City ever have any clue that their duly elected Circuit Attorney wasn’t at the office – or in court – because she was busy working on her registered nursing degree at a local college?

…The report also shines new light on the abrupt timing of Gardner’s resignation in May, showing a judge was about to rule on whether Bailey could schedule Gardner for a deposition as well as get records from Saint Louis University showing how often Gardner was taking nursing classes there instead of fulfilling her duties as the city’s top prosecutor.

The catalyst for Bailey being able to file the lawsuit for removal was a car crash in which a young volleyball player lost both her legs. The driver at fault was a 17 year old on house arrest for an armed robbery months before, but Garner’s office was never quite ready to go to court. Nor, after repeated violations of his house arrest, did they ever make any moves to lock the lad up. The young lady should never have been in harm’s way from this criminal.

To make matters worse, when there were court proceedings for the case, the Gardner CAs office seemed to have problems attending. Gardner herself had more important business at nursing school.

April 27

Ms. Gardner spent the entire morning, and part of the afternoon, until 12:44 p.m., at Family Care Health Centers performing her clinicals (or practicum) to meet the criteria to obtain her master’s in nursing degree from Saint Louis University. An investigator for the Attorney General’s Office saw Ms. Gardner at the clinic.

At 1:30 p.m., Judge Michael Noble conducted a show cause hearing in which Gardner failed to appear. He scheduled the hearing after one of her assistant prosecutors failed to show up for a hearing on a separate case and announced he was considering holding Gardner and her assistant in contempt. Noble concluded there was probable cause to believe that Gardner and her assistant prosecutor were guilty of indirect criminal contempt. He set an evidentiary hearing for May 30, 2023, and declared Gardner’s office appeared to be a “rudderless ship of chaos.”

April 28

Despite findings by Noble, Gardner returned to Family Care Health Centers. Again, an investigator for the Attorney General’s Office witnessed Gardner at the clinic.

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The panicked timing of Gardner’s own resignation was calculated to prevent the nursing school records from being released, and quash the entire investigation.

May 16

A hearing was scheduled for 1:30 p.m., in which a judge was going to rule on whether the Attorney General’s Office could get documents from the nursing school and the clinic and schedule a video deposition of Gardner. However, two hours before the hearing, at 11:31 a.m., Gardner sent an email to Gov. Michael Parson to inform him that she was resigning from office “effective today.”

“Then, apparently realizing that any delay in her resignation would permit further action in the quo warranto proceedings — including disclosure of the nursing school records she was seeking to conceal— 16 minutes later, at 11:47 a.m., Gardner sent a second email to Parson, stating that her resignation was ‘effective immediately,’” according to the report.

Ms. Gardner then moved to dismiss the petition in quo warranto as moot.

She utterly failed there. The evidence, the interviews, the results, and conclusions are damning. People are already asking if there is still some way this person can be held accountable for the disaster that is the St Louis CAs office. The judges AG Bailey interviewed do bring up

Over the course of the AGO’s investigation, the investigative team interviewed more than 10 different judges from the 22nd Judicial Circuit. The judges expressed “dismay, disappointment, and despair” over the state of the Circuit Attorney’s Office, particularly with respect to the ability to resolve cases through litigation and with respect to the ability to notify victims of impending dispositions and trials.

Other judges pointed out that, despite Missouri law to the contrary, Gardner’s office was not charging defendants with armed criminal action even when the defendant was charged with committing a felony, and where the defendant committed that felony by, with, or through the knowing use of a deadly weapon or dangerous instrument. The United States Supreme Court has specifically held that Missouri law authorizes separate punishment for the act of committing a felony by, with, or through the knowing use of a deadly weapon. Later conversations with assistant circuit attorneys confirmed that this policy directive came from Gardner and her administration.

Several judges explained that, due to understaffing and mismanagement by the senior administrative team, the assistant circuit attorneys were frequently not ready for trial. When local media began to report on this, the judges noticed that Gardner began directing her staff to force judges to enter orders dismissing cases for lack of prosecution, in an apparent effort to redirect the community’s ire from Gardner to the judicial circuit. As a result, the circuit had to adopt an administrative rule for reassigning dismissed and refiled cases. This pattern and practice helped explain why the circuit court had dismissed 2,735 criminal cases during Ms. Gardner’s tenure as Circuit Attorney.

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Accountability – what is it? The synopsis the local station did is horrifying and I highly recommend you read it when you have a chance.

Gardner was also actively at war with the police department in St. Louis, going as far as blacklisting police officers for “credibility issues” which would undermine their testimony at any cases her office did decide to prosecute.

…Murphey’s resistance to Gardner — Chigurupati’s boss when Vincent’s case went to trial — was unusual and, perhaps, extreme. By his own account, he was willing to help murder suspects walk free to make a point, even if he arrested them and believed that they should be behind bars.

In 2019, Gardner added Murphey to a list of police officers who would not be allowed to apply for criminal charges because of questions about their credibility, and she said her office would evaluate whether those officers could testify in court. Although the identities of those officers were not made public, one of Murphey’s supervisors notified him that his name was on Gardner’s list.

Weeks later, a prosecutor in Gardner’s office notified Murphey that the office not only would actually let him testify in the cases he had led that were heading to trial — it expected him to.

Murphey, who retired in September 2021, said he felt stuck in a Catch-22. If Gardner was going to impugn his character and question his credibility, he decided, he wouldn’t cooperate with her prosecutors. He believed that if he went to court, defense lawyers would use his inclusion on Gardner’s list to attack him on cross-examination, making the trials more about him than the defendants.

Fiendish.

In what is probably the biggest repudiation to whatever defense Gardner might mount, the new Circuit Attorney has taken the bull by the horns in that city.

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The number of charges filed in crime-ridden St. Louis, Missouri, has already more than doubled in just three months since George Soros-backed progressive prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned in disgrace, it emerged Friday.

Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore, 54, took over from Gardner, 48, after she suddenly quit in May amid multiple efforts to remove her as murders reached a 50-year high.

Since he was sworn in on May 31, Gore has already filed 1,400 cases — more than double the 620 cases Gardner filed during the same period last year, according to a review of cases by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

But there’s a lot of backlog to clean-up, a lot of fences to mend, and he has to get re-elected.

Soros sowing chaos.

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