Attorney-Client Privilege?

So, what happened here?
The FBI wiretapped 2 conversations and one voicemail defense investigators for Mohamed Osman Mohamud had with Khan in June 2011 and then handed those recordings over to the prosecutor who prosecuted Mohamud and is prosecuting Khan.

In a filing in April, Khan’s lawyers moved to obtain information about the government’s minimization procedures. They pointed to 4 different privileged conversations that had been included in discovery...

While all this doesn’t explain what the tie between Khan and Mohamud is — in its response, the government actually claims it is “unrelated” and that it was not handed over to prosecutors until after the conclusion of Mohamud’s case (which would mean it wasn’t provided to the prosecutor before he indicted Khan) — it does make it clear that the government would share the privileged conversations of one defendant with that defendant’s prosecutor via the prosecution of another defendant under FISA.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The simplest case is that they were discussing plans to use the attorney's services in furtherance of a crime.

Valerie

Ymar Sakar said...

They obviously didn't do a parallel evidence track. You need to come up with a way to get the same data naturally and via the evidence chain, even if you got tipped off by the All Seeing Eye and Obama Whispers.

Texan99 said...

Valerie may be right, and sometimes what is excluded as against one defendant may be used against another. Privilege and evidence exclusion have many exceptions.

Or they may just have been playing hardball and got caught.