Overview
- A federal judge threw out five of the seven counts in the indictment against Dalya Attar and two co-defendants, including the extortion counts.
- The judge wrote that the conduct alleged in the indictment is troubling but does not fall within the federal statute that prosecutors used for the extortion charges.
- Two counts remain: a conspiracy charge and a count for intercepting electronic communications, and those surviving charges keep the federal prosecution active.
- The indictment says Attar, her brother Joseph Attar, and Baltimore officer Kalman Finkelstein secretly recorded a former campaign consultant and threatened to share the tape to push her out of the 2022 House of Delegates race.
- The ruling reduces the number of federal counts but leaves open possible appeals or prosecutorial choices and continues to shape the political fallout after Attar lost her recent Democratic primary.