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ST. LOUIS — Former ӣ����Ƶ Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner misused public money to save her personal law license during an ethics investigation into her office’s handling of the criminal case against former Gov. Eric Greitens, federal authorities announced Wednesday.

In a signed agreement, Gardner admitted to directing office employees to issue $5,004.33 in checks from a circuit attorney’s contingency fund to reimburse herself for fees and costs associated with a Supreme Court reprimand in 2022.

She will avoid federal criminal prosecution as long as she pays the city back, doesn’t break any laws and follows the instructions of her pretrial services officer for 18 months, according to the agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“This is a just and fair outcome for a case involving a former official and the use of public funds,” U.S. Attorney Sayler Fleming said in a news release.

Gardner’s attorney, Harvard professor Ronald Sullivan Jr., said his client wanted to spare the court’s time and resources by entering into the agreement.

“While Ms. Gardner was prepared to vigorously defend any allegations that may have been lodged against her, she and the government agreed to end any dispute and terminate any investigation with the pre-charge diversion agreement,” he said in an email.

Wednesday’s news comes a year and a half after Gardner resigned. At the time, she was facing threats from the state Legislature to strip her office of most of its power and a lawsuit from the attorney general’s office seeking her removal.

But for years, her office had been criticized for understaffing and organizational dysfunction. She had also been the subject of multiple ethics probes.

Gardner, a Democrat, took office in early 2017. More than a year later, she announced her office had indicted Greitens, a Republican, on a felony invasion of privacy charge that accused him of taking and transmitting a non-consensual photo of a partly nude woman with whom he was having an affair.

She hired Sullivan, a Harvard law professor who represented Michael Brown’s family in their civil lawsuit, to be a consultant.

But defense lawyers for Greitens quickly began raising the alarm about potential misconduct. They said Gardner had allowed an investigator in the case, William Don Tisaby, to commit perjury during a deposition.

Tisaby claimed that he didn’t take notes during interviews with witnesses, but videos of those interviews showed he was taking notes.

ӣ����Ƶ Judge Rex Burlison ruled that Gardner could be called as a witness to testify about Tisaby’s conduct. Instead, she dismissed the charge against Greitens.

An investigation later revealed that Tisaby concealed documents and interview notes during the Greitens case. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and admitted to hiding, through false testimony, documents provided to him by Gardner.

Gardner, meanwhile, faced an ethics investigation from state bar officials into the role she played in Tisaby’s conduct.

In 2022, she reached an agreement in which she accepted a reprimand and was ordered to pay $750, avoiding disbarment or a suspension of her license. Court officials also ordered her to pay the costs of investigating the ethics case and the expenses of the lawyer in charge of the disciplinary proceedings.

At the time, her lawyer, Michael Downey, released a statement saying Gardner “has learned from this process and has improved her office’s operations.”

But in this week’s agreement with prosecutors, Gardner admitted to directing employees to issue checks to pay the disciplinary costs and depositing them into her personal bank account.

“Kimberly Gardner was not entitled under the law to that additional compensation,” the agreement says.

In order for the misuse of public funds to be a federal crime, the amount at issue must be more than $5,000.

U.S. Attorney Fleming noted in a news release that Gardner’s case “just met the minimum required.”