A St. Louis circuit judge has denied a motion that would have essentially thrown out William Tisaby’s case because he didn’t sign the deposition at the heart of his perjury charges.
Tisaby, the former FBI agent hired by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner to help in the criminal investigation of then-Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, was indicted in June with seven felony counts, including multiple perjury charges.
His trial is set for March 30.
At a December 2 hearing, Tisaby’s defense attorneys argued that Tisaby never had a chance to review his first deposition during the Greitens criminal trial. He never received a copy of it, and he never signed it, as required by state law. Therefore, Tisaby’s deposition is “inadmissible,” wrote his attorneys in a court motion filed on November 5, and his testimony is “permanently incomplete.”
On December 4, Circuit Judge Bryan Hettenbach ruled that the lack of Tisaby’s signature did not mean the deposition should be rejection, which would result in the perjury case to be dropped.
“His motion is carefully drafted not to assert that he has not read the transcript or that he does not have a copy available,” Hettenbach wrote. “Instead he contends that he never ‘received’ the transcript and that ‘Greitens’ legal team successfully opposed his request to review’ it. This argument is without merit.”
This ruling sided with the argument presented by Gerard Carmody, the special prosecutor in Tisaby’s grand jury case, during the December 2 hearing.
Gardner hired Tisaby in January 2018, soon after Greitens admitted that he had an affair with his hairdresser, a woman identified by her initials K.S. Greitens would later be charged with invasion of privacy for allegedly taking a semi-nude picture of K.S. without her consent and then transferring it in a way that it could be accessed by a computer.
Gardner said she needed to hire an outside investigator because the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department refused to look into the case. The department said it was never asked to investigate.
On March 19, 2018, Greitens’ defense team deposed Tisaby for approximately nine hours, and at that time Tisaby “reserved signature” — meaning he requested a copy of his deposition so he could review it before he signed it, according to the November motion. On April 26, 2018 — 36 days later — Tisaby was scheduled for a second deposition, yet he had still not received a copy of his first one, the motion states.
So, Tisaby sought out a lawyer and attempted to obtain a continuance, or extension, to have a chance to review the deposition and clear the record if needed. Greitens’ attorneys knew Tisaby had not read the deposition, the motion states, “yet aggressively pursued a second deposition to catch Mr. Tisaby in several lies.”
In his ruling Hettenbach wrote, “Any deposition transcript changes that Tisaby might have made would only appear alongside his original responses, always leaving a fact question as to whether any response was false.”
On April 26, 2018 the court denied Tisaby’s request for a continuance, and Tisaby’s attorney, Jermaine Wooten, advised him to plead the Fifth Amendment during the second deposition.
Greitens’ attorneys accused Tisaby of lying about whether he had taken notes during an interview with Greitens’ alleged victim. The police department investigated this claim, which spurred the grand jury proceedings. In June 2018, Mullen appointed Carmody, of Carmody MacDonald law firm, to oversee the grand jury investigation into Tisaby’s perjury charge.
“They didn’t give him time to look at it, and that was wrong,” said attorney Daniel Dailey, who is also representing Tisaby. “And the defense team used that as a way to get ex-Governor Greitens off.”
