The George Soros-backed prosecutor who filed felony charges against a St. Louis couple this week for waving guns at an angry mob surrounding their home tampered with key evidence, according to an investigation by a local Missouri TV station.
The evidence includes Patricia McCloskey’s gun, which was deemed inoperable when she confronted the violent protesters who were trespassing on private property.
But Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner ordered the city’s crime lab to reassemble the gun into working order after confiscating the firearm so that she could score a conviction against the McCloskeys.
Missouri law requires the state to prove that firearms are “readily capable of lethal use.”
Because Patricia McCloskey’s gun was inoperable at the time of its “use,” Gardner would not have been able to score a conviction based on the felony charges brought against her.
But because the city’s crime lab reassembled the gun, Gardner is able to claim that the gun was, in fact, operable at the time and press charges that could carry a sentence of up to four years in prison.
Experts in the gun lab admitted that when they disassembled the firearm, it was not working at all. The firing-pin spring was put in front of the firing pin, which was backward, and the entire weapon was incapable of firing, according to documents from the lab.
Patricia McCloskey intentionally disabled her firearm so that she would not hurt anyone, said her attorney, Joe Schwartz.
“It’s disheartening to learn that a law enforcement agency altered evidence in order to prosecute an innocent member of the community,” he told 5 On Your Side, a local NBC News affiliate.
Gardner, a radical whose campaign was heavily funded by billionaire mega-donor George Soros, did not mention the lab’s original findings in her criminal complaint against the McCloskeys.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has made it clear that if Gardner moves forward with these charges, he will pardon the McCloskeys.
“I will do everything within the Constitution of the State of Missouri to protect law-abiding citizens and those people are exactly that. They are law-abiding citizens, and they’re being attacked frankly by a political process that’s really unfortunate,” he said.
