Snyder continues to push for information on feds' email review
Chicago Tribune
April 30, 2018
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/news/ct-ptb-snyder-trial-discovery-push-st-0501-story.html
Having already questioned federal investigators’ access to Portage Mayor James Snyder’s email, his defense team is continuing its push to find out how those emails were screened.
Defense attorney Jackie Bennett Jr. and federal prosecutors have exchanged a series of court filings as Snyder’s team tries to force the release of documentation of how investigators were told to screen the mayor’s email communication, according to documents filed Monday.
Bennett said asked to court to compel federal investigators to release “documentary materials regarding its privilege filter” showing how Snyder’s seized email communications were screened, but Assistant U.S. Attorney Jill Koster said, in court filings, what the defense is seeking “are not things which can be inspected or copied like books or documents.”
Snyder argued that the government has not produced any evidence that it maintained a privilege filter during its investigation into the case, according to court filings, and prosecutors now say that information is not subject to discovery as it is work product.
“When Snyder now seeks confirmation that the government did not have a mechanism to recognize and quarantine from the trial team such work product, the government responds that information regarding its purported privilege filter is protected as its own work product,” Bennett wrote in court documents. “Apart from its self-serving rhetorical tautology, however, this argument should be denied for its sheer chutzpah.”
Koster said “the defendant’s interrogatories seek answers, not things” but then recast its request for material the defense would not have access to.
“What takes chutzpah is misrepresenting the holding of a Supreme Court case to support one’s request for discovery which is specifically prohibited by a black-letter rule of federal criminal procedure,” Koster wrote.
The documentation on the “taint team” procedures sought by Snyder’s attorneys follows accusations that the trial team had access to privileged emails between the mayor and his defense attorneys, according to court documents, and warrants a judge to require new prosecutors handle the case and could rise to the dismissal of several charges.
The allegations against the prosecutors say email communications between Snyder, defense attorney Thomas Dogan, and Thomas Kirsch II, who was then the mayor’s defense attorney before being appointed as U.S. attorney, were seized in 2015, according to court documents.
Kirsch has recused himself from Snyder’s case, according to court documents, and U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois would oversee and manage local prosecutors handling the case.
Judge Joseph Van Bokkelen has set a May 10 hearing to review the motion to disqualify the trial team and potentially dismiss some of the charges against Snyder.
Snyder and John Cortina, of Kustom Auto Body in Portage, were charged in November 2016 with allegedly violating a federal bribery statue. Federal prosecutors said the mayor allegedly solicited money from Cortina and “Individual A” and gave them a towing contract for Portage.
Snyder received an additional bribery indictment for alleged accepting $13,000 in connection with a Board of Works contract, and allegedly obstructing Internal Revenue Service laws.
Snyder and Cortina both pleaded not guilty to the charges, according to court documents.
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