St. Louis prosecutor shares investigative files with Missouri House after subpoena

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s office has turned over its investigative materials to the Missouri House committee probing allegations against Gov. Eric Greitens.

Gardner’s office dropped a felony invasion of privacy case against Greitens on Monday after a judge agreed to let the governor’s attorneys depose her in the case about alleged perjury by an investigator.

The dismissal of the case enabled Gardner’s office to comply Wednesday with an April subpoena from the House investigative committee for documents related to the case and share its investigative materials with lawmakers.

"We turned over everything they asked for," said Susan Ryan, spokeswoman for the circuit attorney's office. "We were no longer under the seal the judge had given because the case was dismissed."

Rep. Jay Barnes, a Jefferson City Republican and chair of the House investigative committee, had no comment when reached by The Star Thursday afternoon.

Greitens’ legal team also had faced a subpoena from lawmakers related to the case, but like the prosecutor’s office was blocked from sharing materials under the judge’s order.

The governor’s team did not immediately comment Thursday on Gardner’s decision to share the materials with the House committee or say whether it also has complied with its subpoena.

Lawmakers are weighing whether to impeach the governor after allegations that he photographed a woman without her consent to keep from speaking about an extramarital affair in 2015.

They also are reviewing allegations that the governor improperly obtained a charity donor list to raise money for his 2016 campaign and lied about it last year on a form submitted to the state's ethics commission.

Gardner’s office launched an investigation into the invasion of privacy allegations in January, but prosecutors failed to find the alleged photograph at the center of the case, a point hammered by Greitens’ team in a legal filing Monday.

“At the close of discovery, we are where we were when this case was first indicted — there is no photograph. The State has searched every conceivable location for the alleged photograph and come up dry. Every e-mail account, the cloud account, the Apple account, and the alleged phone itself have all been searched, yet no photograph was ever found,” Greitens’ attorneys argued in a motion to dismiss the case that was filed only hours before the prosecutor dropped the charge.

The filing from Greitens’ team, which was obtained by The Star, said that no witness in the case, including the woman, had seen the alleged photograph.

“She claims she saw a flash and heard a sound similar to an iPhone camera, but she never saw an iPhone in the basement. She claims Mr. Greitens said he had deleted a photograph, but she was never shown a photograph and she never asked to see a ‘deletion.’ Her testimony can never establish beyond a reasonable doubt that a photograph was taken,” the motion stated.

Gardner told The Associated Press that a decision is expected by June 1 on whether to refile the felony charge.

She said that on March 16, three weeks after the indictment accusing the governor of taking a compromising photo of his hairdresser without her permission, several of Greitens' lawyers came to her office to try to persuade her to drop the case. "Basically they told me I would be ruined personally, professionally, and it's only going to get worse," she said.

She alleged a similar threat was made in April shortly before she filed a second felony charge alleging that Greitens illegally used the donor list from a veterans charity he founded to raise money for his gubernatorial campaign. No trial date has been set on that charge of tampering with computer data.

Greitens' attorney Jack Garvey disputed Gardner's account of the meetings.

"The Circuit Attorney's allegations, as always, are completely false. There were no personal attacks on the Circuit Attorney," Garvey wrote in a statement Thursday.

The Star's Jason Hancock and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was originally published May 17, 2018 at 2:56 PM with the headline "St. Louis prosecutor shares investigative files with Missouri House after subpoena."