ST. LOUIS • Police and a special prosecutor seized the email server from the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office Tuesday afternoon amid a grand jury investigation into alleged perjury by a former FBI agent hired last year to investigate ex-Gov. Eric Greitens.

The server was taken by police officers and an attorney for the special prosecutor for about an hour, from 3 to 4 p.m., according to a statement released Wednesday by Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner.

An attorney for Gardner criticized the move as an effort to “intimidate and humiliate” the circuit attorney.

“In my decades of work in the criminal justice system, I have never seen a chief prosecutor treated this way by a court or a police department,” Gardner’s attorney, Roy L. Austin Jr., said in a statement released by the circuit attorney’s office.

The same statement complained that the move “temporarily interrupted the circuit attorney’s office’s full use of its computer system that is central to its efforts to keep the citizens of our city safe.”