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A judge in St. Louis is set to appoint a special attorney to handle a case against a far-left prosecutor whose campaign was backed by liberal financier George Soros.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Judge Michael Noble appointed a special prosecutor after St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and her assistant, Christopher Desilets, failed to appear in court for an assault case. The judge alleged that there was evidence that suggested both Gardner and Desilets were guilty of indirect criminal contempt, as Desilets failed to attend both a trial and a subsequent 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 make an appearance at Noble’s hearing and instead sent her deputy, Rob Huq, who was unable to provide satisfactory answers to the judge’s queries regarding the contempt allegations. Michael Downey, Gardner’s attorney, was present at the hearing, but he did not comment on the matter afterward, the report said.
Gardner has had a history of ethical issues, but her problems came to a head earlier this year when Missouri’s Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey demanded her removal. Bailey initiated removal proceedings against her after a man who had repeatedly violated his bond conditions and did not have a driver’s license hit and severely injured a 16-year-old volleyball player who was visiting St. Louis.
In addition, Gardner was hit with new negligence and potential misconduct complaints in April.
“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.”
Last year, she was accused of “disturbing and unethical” conduct by a grand jury after she admitted engaging in prosecutorial misconduct in a case involving former Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens.
In April of 2022, the Missouri Supreme Court directed Gardner to fulfill a public records request from John Solomon, the Editor-in-Chief of Just the News, relating to the prosecution of Greitens.
In July 2019, Solomon filed a public records request under the state’s Sunshine Law, seeking about two and a half years’ worth of communications between Gardner’s office and the Missouri Workforce Housing Association, state Reps. Stacy Newman and Jay Barnes, and several other groups and individuals.
The public records request was specifically related to Gardner’s unsuccessful prosecution of Greitens in 2018, buth which nevertheless led to the former governor’s resignation from office after less than two years.
The prosecutor accused Greitens of a felony invasion of privacy for allegedly threatening to release a photo of his partially nude girlfriend if she talked about their affair. However, Gardner had to drop the case after admitting she lacked the alleged photo and faced the prospect of being called as a witness in the case by Greteins’ lawyers.
Solomon’s suit alleged that Gardner knowingly violated the law and sought the release of the records, civil penalties, and attorney fees. After several legal proceedings, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Gardner to comply with the request in April 2022.
Gardner, who was fired in February, had also faced criticism in 2020 for her case against Mark McCloskey, who gained national attention for brandishing firearms at protesters outside his home during Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Gardner was barred from prosecuting McCloskey after she used his case to raise funds for her re-election campaign.
Former President Donald Trump took aim at Soros in a new campaign video released in mid-April.
In a video shared on Truth Social, the former president claimed that the United States was being damaged by “Marxist” and “communist” district attorneys and he vowed to take action to fix it if he is elected president again.
“There is no more dire threat to the American way of life than the corruption and weaponization of our justice system. And it’s happening all around us,” the former president said.
“As president, it will be my personal mission to restore the scales of justice in America. We want fairness and equality under the law. And to that end, I will appoint US attorneys who will be the polar opposite of the Soros district attorneys and others that are being appointed throughout the United States. Very unfair to our population, very unfair to our country,” he said.
