A St. Louis judge is expected to appoint a special prosecutor to oversee a case against a far-left prosecutor whose campaign was funded by the liberal financier George Soros.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, after St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and her assistant Christopher Desilets neglected to appear in court for an assault case, Judge Michael Noble appointed a special prosecutor. The judge alleged that there was evidence that Gardner and Desilets were both culpable of indirect criminal contempt, as Desilets missed both a trial and a hearing.
“It appears that Ms. Gardner has complete indifference and a conscious disregard for the judicial process,” said the judge, according to the news outlet.
Gardner did not attend Noble’s hearing and instead sent her delegate, Rob Huq, who was unable to satisfy the judge’s questions regarding the contempt allegations. According to the report, Gardner’s attorney, Michael Downey, was present at the hearing but did not remark afterward.
Gardner has a history of ethical issues, but her difficulties reached a head earlier this year when Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri, demanded her removal. Bailey initiated removal proceedings against her after a man who had repeatedly violated his bond conditions and lacked a driver’s license gravely injured a visiting 16-year-old volleyball player in St. Louis.
In April, Gardner received additional allegations of negligence and potential misconduct.
“Instead of protecting victims, Circuit Attorney Gardner is creating them,” the Missouri attorney general said at the time. “This is the latest in a long pattern of brazen neglect. The St. Louis Circuit Attorney has a long history of failure to prosecute violent crime, with a backlog of at least 3,000 cases.
A grand jury accused her of “disturbing and unethical” behavior after she acknowledged prosecutorial misconduct in a case involving former Republican governor of Missouri Eric Greitens.
In April 2022, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Gardner to comply with Just the News’s Editor-in-Chief John Solomon’s public records request regarding the prosecution of Greitens.
Solomon filed a request for public records under the state’s Sunshine Law in July 2019, seeking approximately two and a half years’ worth of correspondence between Gardner’s office and the Missouri Workforce Housing Association, state Representatives Stacy Newman and Jay Barnes, and a number of other organizations and individuals.
The public records request pertained explicitly to Gardner’s unsuccessful prosecution of Greitens in 2018, which nonetheless led to the resignation of the former governor after less than two years in office.
The prosecutor charged Greitens with the felony offense of invasion of privacy for allegedly threatening to release a photo of his semi-naked fiancée if she disclosed their affair. Gardner was forced to drop the lawsuit after admitting she lacked the alleged photograph and confronted the possibility of being called as a witness by Greteins’ attorneys.
Solomon’s lawsuit alleged that Gardner willfully violated the law and demanded the release of the records, in addition to civil penalties and attorney fees. In April 2022, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Gardner to comply with the request following multiple legal proceedings.
Gardner was terminated in February and faced criticism in 2020 for her case against Mark McCloskey, who garnered national attention for brandishing firearms at protesters outside his home during Black Lives Matter protests. Gardner was prohibited from prosecuting McCloskey after she utilized his case to raise money for her reelection campaign.
More on this story via Conservative Brief:
Former President Donald Trump took aim at Soros in a new campaign video released in mid-April. CONTINUE READING…
