How Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s national focus shortchanges Missouri

In February 2023, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked a judge to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, citing “years of willful neglect” in her management of the office. In the three months that followed, leading up to Gardner’s resignation, myriad events gave credence to Bailey’s claim:

The no-show: Gardner’s office failed to have anyone show up to prosecute a murder trial. 

The churn: Between February and May, her office lost approximately a third of its attorneys, mostly to resignations.

A questionable hire: According to Bailey’s investigation, Gardner’s office paid more than $200,000 to a man whose law license had been suspended and who likely lived in Virginia. 

A strange false report: In the months between Bailey’s removal petition and Gardner’s resignation, one of her assistant circuit attorneys was accused of making a false report to St. Louis Police concerning an assault. (She later said she was drunk and may have remembered the location incorrectly.) 

After Bailey’s efforts led to Gardner’s resignation that May, the attorney general’s stock was at its peak among many St. Louisans, who welcomed new leadership at the prosecutor’s office that had been branded by one local judge as “a rudderless ship of chaos.” 

But since then, some observers note that the rudder on Bailey’s own ship has gone a little wobbly, with ironic parallels. Consider the following: 

The no-show: Bailey’s office no-showed a July 16 case management conference in a lawsuit it had brought against Pink Energy, a solar energy company accused of bilking customers out of thousands of dollars. After the no-show, a St. Louis County judge dismissed the suit. 

The churn: Bailey’s office has had its own significant churn. Will Scharf, who is challenging Bailey in the GOP primary, says his campaign crunched publicly available employee data and found less than half of the attorneys at the AG’s office at the start of Bailey’s tenure are still there now. 

A questionable hire: In September, Bailey announced that his former mentor, Kelly King, would become a deputy attorney general. King had previously been Warren County’s prosecuting attorney, where she was featured in a series of columns by the Post-Dispatch’s Tony Messenger. Messenger called King’s office “broken,” jammed with a backlog of cases (not unlike Gardner’s), brought upon by prosecutors overcharging defendants and balking at plea deals.

A strange false report. Most recently, an assistant attorney general left the office in July after reporting an incident that St. Louis Police say never occurred.

Spokeswoman Madeline Sieren rejects any notion of parallels between Bailey’s office and Gardner. “To compare his record with the Soros-backed prosecutor that he successfully ousted from office is laughable. Under AG Bailey’s tenure, prosecution has increased. Kim Gardner’s tenure resulted in a stunning decline. Kim Gardner prosecuted maybe 4 percent of crimes reported in the City of St. Louis. AG Bailey has increased prosecution of violent crime by 133 percent. (Those are requests from local law enforcement to have his team prosecute local crime.)”

Bailey’s office has previously explained the no-show at the Pink Energy hearing by saying that his office is still actively pursuing the company in bankruptcy court. About the office churn, Sieren tells SLM that under Bailey’s tenure the overall vacancy rate has dropped from from 24 to 8 percent. “He also reduced office turnover by 10 percent in one year through his increased recruitment and retention efforts,” she says. (A GOP operative close to the campaign also notes that the staff churn was worse under Bailey’s predecessor, U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, something the campaign has been loath to argue due to Schmitt’s status in the Republican party.)

While Sieren gave no comment on the alleged false report made to police by the assistant attorney general, she minced no words about Messenger’s columns, saying, “Per usual, Tony Messenger got the facts egregiously wrong. Kelly King is one of the best prosecutors in the State of Missouri and is an asset to our office.” It’s also worth noting that Messenger blasted King for overcharging defendants, whereas the knock on Gardner was that crimes went un-charged.

Michael Hafner, a general consultant for the Bailey campaign, says that comparing Bailey to Gardner is a narrative being pushed by his opponent in the upcoming primary. Hafner called it “nothing more than an election-year stunt to score cheap political points at the expense of hard-working attorneys in the office who are dedicated public servants. It’s disrespectful to them and disingenuous to Missouri voters.” 

But the Gardner comparison resonates with some close watchers of the office. 

“There have been similar issues, things that he faulted [Gardner] for are running rampant in his office,” says J. Andrew Hirth, who was with the AG’s office from 2010 to 2017, working as the office’s deputy general counsel for the majority of his time there.  

Elad Gross, who is running for Bailey’s job as a Democrat, says that he sees similarities as well, in particular the staff turnover causing a loss in institutional knowledge. Campaigning around the state, he often hears from Missourians who have fallen victim to scam callers or otherwise been ripped off. He says they tell him they called the office’s Consumer Protection Division only to never get a call back. 

Gross specifically recalls the story of one family who called for the division for help. “[They] actually got someone on the phone, did an intake, never heard from the office again, ended up going to court against the scammer, and someone from the [office] showed up on the day of the hearing asking if they needed any help, which was way too late,” Gross says.

To Hirth’s mind, the cause of the dysfunction in Bailey’s office is no secret. 

“The problems are of his own making,” Hirth says. “Largely due to frivolous litigation.”

As attorney general, Bailey has filed lawsuits against the New York district attorney who prosecuted the hush money case against Donald Trump, against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for supposedly flying illegal immigrants to Missouri, and against a Kansas City area Planned Parenthood, among other litigation. The Planned Parenthood suit, according to the Missouri Independent, stems from a man “pretending to be a concerned uncle” getting advice about out-of-state abortion services from an employee at the healthcare nonprofit for his “non-existent 13-year-old niece.” 

“Campaigning and governing are two different things,” says Anita Manion, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “Some of the governing decisions Bailey has made, like the national lawsuits, are part of campaigning.” She adds, “The average voter might not notice the dysfunction but they are more likely to recognize the big headlines like, ‘Andrew Bailey sues New York.’” 

But, Hirth says, that higher profile comes at a cost. “The regular business of the AG’s office is just going undone because they’re focused on stuff that a first-year law student would know you can’t do.”

Hirth identifies the office’s tilt toward national politics and the culture wars beginning with now Senator Josh Hawley, and being carried on by Hawley’s successor, Schmitt, who rode the wave of publicity to a U.S. Senate seat of his own.

Cara Harris worked for the attorney general’s office for almost 30 years, under Jay Nixon, Chris Koster, Hawley and the first two years of Schmitt.

She says that the day-in, day-out work of the office is supposed to be things like defending state agencies, enforcing the do-not call list, and other forms of consumer protection. She recalls a specific instance from early in her tenure when the office busted a psychic in Florida who called people on the no-call list. 

“The big joke was that she should have seen it coming,” she says.

All that, Harris notes, is a far cry from the efforts being touted in campaign ads for the current AG’s race. She sees candidates saying they will be tough on violent crime, even though prosecuting violent crimes is a very small part of what a state attorney general does. A recent ad from Bailey’s campaign touted his fights against “Joe Biden’s open border policy” and Planned Parenthood, even as his primary opponent, Scharf, recently began airing one showing Scharf with a grenade launcher. 

Manion says the race is competitive. Bailey has never been elected to statewide office before and Scharf’s credential as “Trump’s attorney” gives him cache with the GOP base. The lawsuits that Hirth calls frivolous also play well with that base. 

Even so, says Manion, “If Bailey does win this election it’s going to be imperative for him to make that shift to running a functional department.”