After meeting with Manhattan prosecutors on Wednesday, lawyers for former IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn characterized the session as “constructive,” but stressed that he was unwilling to plead guilty even to minor charges.
William Taylor III, who along with Benjamin Brafman is representing Strauss-Kahn, said late on Wednesday that they did not discuss a plea bargain in the sexual assault case against their client.
“Mr Strauss-Kahn will not be pleading guilty to anything,” Taylor said.
CHANGE OF PROSECUTOR
In a sign of the deteriorating relationship between the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the woman who made the accusation, her lawyer sent a letter to the district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, requesting that he step aside and let a special prosecutor take over the case.
Vance promptly rejected the request. Prosecutors remove themselves only in extraordinary circumstances, generally when there is a personal stake in the outcome or a clear conflict of interest.
In the letter, the lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, said Vance’s office had reached disturbing conclusions about his client based on a summary of a recorded phone conversation she had with a man in an immigration detention center.
Last week, prosecutors informed Thompson that the conversation raised “very troubling” questions about her credibility because she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing charges against a wealthy man.
However, Thompson said on Wednesday that prosecutors had told him that they were basing their conclusions on “a digest of the conversation” rather than on the recording itself or a full transcript of it, which was in a dialect of the Fulani language of the woman’s native Guinea.
However, a law enforcement official said on Wednesday that the recorded conversation between the woman and the man, who is accused of dealing drugs, was one of at least three in which she talked about the encounter with Strauss-Kahn and its aftermath. Investigators were continuing to review and analyze the conversations with Fulani interpreters, the official said.
In the letter, Thompson said that prosecutors had improperly maligned his client without access to the full conversation.
He said they first described their understanding of the recorded conversation to him on Thursday last week, and then repeated it to the New York Times. Thompson cited the Times’ account of the conversation as one of several “damaging and prejudicial leaks” from prosecutors as part of the reason for requesting that Vance recuse himself.
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