Kim Gardner has been out of the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office for four months — but St. Louis may not have heard the last word about her tenure. In fact, several investigations into Gardner’s actions and operations remain open, both state and potentially also federal.
Most publicly, staffers with the Missouri State Auditor's Office have been at the Circuit Attorney's Office downtown for much of July and August. A spokesperson for Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick tells the RFT that the audit began in June 2021 under Nicole Galloway. When Fitzpatrick came into office this past January, he encountered "numerous roadblocks from Gardner," says Trevor Fox, the office’s director of communications. These roadblocks included her releasing documents so "heavily redacted to the point it was of no use" as well as refusing to release documents altogether.
However, new Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore has "fully cooperated" with the audit, according to Fox.
"For the first time in the course of the audit, staff from the Auditor's Office have been allowed on site to do their work,” Fox said. "So the audit team has in fact done extensive field work for the audit, but the release date for the final report will likely be in 2024."
Fox says there are six staff members from the auditor's office working on the audit.
He adds, "If the audit team finds anything criminal in nature while performing the audit, they will notify local law enforcement and provide any relevant information to them."
Gardner has not responded to requests for comment made through her family’s funeral home. Her former spokesperson says she does not know of anyone fielding Gardner’s media inquiries.
The status of a probe by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is more complicated.
When Gardner resigned in May, it put a stop to Bailey’s efforts to remove her from office. The AG’s three-month investigation had already turned up numerous revelations about the prosecutor's office under Gardner, including prosecutors carrying caseloads that numbered in the hundreds and repeated failures to disclose evidence to defense attorneys.
Following the RFT's revelations of Gardner being enrolled in an advanced nursing program, Bailey's office made public that she was in clinicals while her subordinates had appeared in her stead at an April contempt hearing.
Bailey’s spokeswoman suggests they have found even more, although those files have yet to become public.
“Had the quo warranto process continued, the Attorney General’s office would have continued to vigorously prosecute the case against Kim Gardner," says Bailey's communications director Madeline Sieren. "And new findings would have come to light.”
Bailey pointedly continued pursuing the quo warranto case even after Gardner announced on May 4 that she would resign, though the process came to halt when she actually left office on May 16.
State law expressly requires that the circuit attorney “devote their entire time and energy to the discharge of their official duties.”
During Gardner’s time as circuit attorney, the office did prosecute two captains with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department for "double dipping," or getting paid by unapproved secondary employers while also on the clock for the police department.
Last April, the Circuit Attorney's Office charged officer Michael Deeba with felony stealing for working a secondary job at a north city manufacturing plant during hours that overlapped when he was on the clock for the SLMPD. In 2020, prosecutors in Gardner's office brought similar charges against a different police captain, Perri Johnson, who worked security for Spire gas company, the advertising firm Osborn Barr and Saint Louis University during the same hours he was getting paid to work for the police department.
Johnson's charges were dropped after he completed a diversion program with the Circuit Attorney's Office. The case against Deeba seems to be headed to a similar outcome. His attorney, Brian Millikan, didn't respond to the RFT's request for comment, but a trial that had been scheduled for June didn’t happen. That same month Deeba entered a diversion program.
Terry Niehoff, a criminal defense attorney who made no secret of his disapproval for Gardner when she was in office, says that while he thinks Gardner's enrollment in a nursing program is a "dereliction of duty," he doesn't see a criminal offense because she wasn't getting paid.
However, Niehoff says that Gardner could still be facing criminal liability for something.
"I always assumed something is going to come. I just don't know how long it's going to take," he says.
He intimated the U.S. Attorney’s Office might be giving her tenure a hard look, saying of the top public corruption prosecutor there, "Hal Goldsmith takes his time."
The U.S. Attorney’s Office does not comment on investigations — or lack thereof — as a matter of policy.
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