Late last night, Attorney General Andrew Bailey released his 62-page report into former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, detailing the months-long quo warranto led by his office that resulted in Gardner abruptly resigning in May.
Among the details in the report is new information about the extent to which Gardner was spending her time pursuing a Master's degree in nursing and the importance that the revelations of her student life played in her resignation.
Prior to her resignation on May 16, Gardner had previously announced she would leave office June 1. Bailey says Gardner abruptly moved up that timetable so she could avoid further disclosures about her degree work at Saint Louis University as well as broader disclosures about her office.
Former Judge William Corrigan, who was with the Attorney General's Office at the time, says that the office first became aware of Gardner's secret life as a nursing student because of a tip submitted to the office' constituent services website. Someone wrote in to say their spouse was a classmate of Gardner, which kicked off the investigation.
Based on that tip, investigators observed on two occasions — April 27 and 28 — as Gardner spent extended periods of time at the Family Care Health Centers clinic in the Grove, completing practicum work. It turned out that Gardner had been enrolled in the Master's program since the fall of 2021, Bailey's report says.
The timing of Gardner's resignation has everything to do with those revelations, the attorney general tells the RTF.
"The day of reckoning was staring her in the face," Bailey says.
At a scheduled May 16 hearing in the quo warranto proceeding, a judge was likely to order both SLU and the clinic to produce records related to Gardner, Bailey says. It's no coincidence that two hours before that hearing, Gardner emailed her resignation to the governor.
"She hit the eject button two hours before we were going to court, in order to deprive the state of thousands of pages of documents that we had subpoenaed," Bailey tells the RFT.
Gardner also had a deposition scheduled for two days later, which her resignation allowed her to avoid.
Bailey tells the RFT that Gardner is "absolutely" open to criminal charges.
"For criminal liability, it could be as simple as she was stealing from the public coffer by using official resources to do private activity, like obtain an advanced degree in nursing," Bailey says.
"There are federal public corruption statutes on the books so the Department of Justice has the authority certainly to pursue a case like that," Bailey adds.
Corrigan says that like many others, the Attorney General's Office also heard rumors that Gardner was not living in St. Louis city, as is required by law for the city's top elected prosecutor. "We did look into that, but we couldn't find any proof that she was not a St. Louis city resident," Corrigan says.
The report details Gardner's resistance to every request made by the Attorney General's Office for documents and other discovery. "She avoided the production of the records," the report says, later adding, "She never handed over a single page of discovery."
What those records say and any further revelations they may contain is currently unknown.
"Those records still exist," Bailey says. "They're still out there to be accessed."
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