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Case 1:20-cr-00330-AJN Document120 Filed 01/25/21 Page 16 of 19
lawyer in a deposition, and a legal opinion about what was “material” in the context of the civil
proceeding. It is unclear how the Government intends to address these issues, however, a trial
with the perjury counts will necessarily involve litigating a complicated defamation action within
a criminal trial, making the trial of this case unnecessarily lengthy and confusing. By May,
2017, shortly before the civil defamation case was dismissed, the matter had generated over 900
docket entries. Approximately 50 substantive motions relating to the admissibility of expert
testimony, deposition testimony, and the admissibility of evidence remained unresolved. Judge
Sweet had yet to rule on evidentiary challenges to thousands of deposition questions and answers
contained in dozens of bankers boxes wheeled into his courtroom on dollies. A trial involving
the perjury counts may well involve revisiting all of these unresolved issues.
Inclusion of the Perjury Counts injects into this case the performance and credibility of
Ms. Maxwell’s lawyers and may require Ms. Maxwell’s counsel of choice to testify. Presumably,
this would result in disqualification of lawyers who have represented Ms. Maxwell for over five
years from the entire trial, even though there is no reason why their testimony would be required
in connection with the Mann Act Counts. See, Rule of Professional Conduct 3.7.
Severance is still appropriate even though the government alleges that some of the
questions posed at the depositions related to some of the alleged victims in this case. Indictment
§§ 2, 8. Even if the government uses some minimal amount of overlapping evidence to prove
both the Perjury Counts and the Mann Act Counts, the miniscule gain in efficiency of
introducing proof is far outweighed be the much larger inefficiency of substantially lengthening
and complicating the trial and by the risk of substantial prejudice to the defendant discussed
above. See Burke, 789 F. Supp. 2d at 398 (severing witness tampering charges from RICO
conspiracy charges in the interests of judicial economy, despite fact that government would have
{2
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Dates
Document Details
| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00002294.jpg |
| File Size | 752.3 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 95.4% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,218 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 16:22:11.530354 |