St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner recently garnered national attention for filing criminal charges against a St. Louis couple who displayed firearms as a warning to an angry mob of Black Lives Matter protesters who trespassed into the gated community where they lived.
Now, as Gardner’s primary election looms, she is back in the news again after it was revealed that a political action committee (PAC) affiliated with her campaign just received a substantial donation from progressive billionaire philanthropist George Soros, as Just the News reported.
Support from Soros
The PAC in question that is supporting Gardner’s re-election effort is known as the Missouri Justice and Public Safety PAC, and as it turns out, according to required financial filings with the state, Soros appears to be the only major donor to that group.
A filing with the Missouri Ethics Commission on Saturday showed that, just days prior to the state’s primary elections on Tuesday, Aug. 4, the PAC was infused with a $116,000 contribution from Soros.
That donation was then, in turn, used to pay off prior debt incurred by the PAC for previous expenditures during this election cycle, the vast majority of which went directly to Gardner’s campaign.
Indeed, the disclosure form showed that the PAC had already spent nearly $105,000 during this election cycle thus far, and following the sizeable donation from Soros, disbursed nearly $78,000 toward paying down that debt, leaving more than $26,000 in remaining debt and about $38,000 in cash on hand.
Of those payouts during the current period, about $40,000 went to a polling firm, while about $37,500 went to a research firm.
Controversial tenure
Just the News noted that Soros had financially backed Gardner when she first sought election to the prosecutor’s office in 2016, one of many left-leaning progressive candidates in down-ballot races Soros has supported in recent years.
Gardner first garnered national attention shortly thereafter when she filed criminal charges against Missouri’s then-Gov. Eric Greitens (R) over an alleged sex scandal, a move that forced him to resign, even though it was later revealed that there was no evidence to support the allegations, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
As a result, Garnder is facing an investigation into her actions related to Greitens, and her chief investigator is reportedly being probed over allegations of evidence tampering.
Troubling pattern
Fast-forward to today, and it appears that the same modus operandi is at play in Gardner’s attempt to prosecute Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis homeowners who stood defiant in the face of an angry mob in late June. That prosecution appears wholly partisan in nature, an appearance seemingly confirmed by the fact that Gardner’s campaign reportedly used the McCloskey prosecution to solicit donations to her re-election effort, as the Daily Caller noted.
For what it is worth, according to Just the News, a spokesman for Soros declined to comment specifically on the matter but also didn’t deny that Soros has provided funding for PACs that support progressive prosecutors like Gardner, all in the name of pursuing “criminal justice reform,” the meaning of which depends entirely upon where one sits on the ideological spectrum.
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