The St. Louis Circuit Court ruled yesterday that the Sunshine Law applies to Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. She can no longer keep secret her numerous contracts for legal representation, and must turn them over to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Oh, don’t think you’ll be seeing them soon.
There will be the inevitable appeal filed by Ms. Gardner. That will eat up a lot of time. Her appeal will eventually be denied — just as all the writs and appeals she has filed since taking office have been denied. Then she will ask for transfer to the Missouri Supreme Court. She will keep doing whatever she can to avoid following the Court’s ruling. She will fight it to the bitter, bitter end. That’s part of her standard operating procedure.
And as she fights the Court’s ruling she will tell the public — as she did in this article — that she has done nothing wrong and is cooperating. Her office in a statement about the Court’s ruling said that she has provided “the available requested documents as we do with all requests to our office.” If that were true, of course, then the Court would not have needed to issue an order; the issue would have been moot. If it were true, the Sunshine case would not have been ongoing for almost a year. If it were true, the contracts would still not be kept from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
This is precisely the same tactics we saw in her handling of the Greitens trial. There she hid evidence, failed to disclose evidence, and obstructed the defense and Court at every step while publicly proclaiming her innocence and victimhood. It ended with the Greitens case dismissed, her chief investigator indicted for perjury, and her reputation in legal circles in ruins.
The ironic part of this is that Gardner publicly described the Greitens defense team as using a “scorched earth” strategy.
The reality is, like in the Sunshine case, she fought her opposition every step of the way to prevent them from simply getting discovery that the law required to be turned over.
The Sunshine case is an outgrowth of Greitens. Ms. Gardner has entered into numerous contracts with private, outside law frims, from Washington D.C. to Kansas City, to help her deal with the problems she created for herself by her actions in Greitens. This includes issues raised during Greitens, during the subsequent grand jury investigation of her and her office and subsequent indictment of her hand-picked investigator Tisaby, her dealing with ethical complaints arising from her handling of Greitens, political lobbying, etc.
She understandably doesn’t want us to see what all these various law firms have been doing for her or how much it’s costing the taxpayers. That’s why she’s been fighting and will continue to fight the disclosure of these contracts. It’s not going to cast her in a good light. That’s why she wants to keep the public in the dark.