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Case 1:20-cr-00330-AJN Document 66 Filed 10/23/20 Page 6 of 7

The Honorable Alison J. Nathan
October 23, 2020
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indictment, severance of counts, disclosure of expert testimony, disclosure of materials to potential experts, F.R.E. 702 challenges to experts, and various motions in limine. Without substantive discovery Ms. Maxwell cannot be prepared to advance or meet any of these matters.

The Government Has Not Complied with Its Discovery Obligations to Ms. Maxwell in the MDC.

Setting aside what the Government has not produced, the discovery that it has produced to Ms. Maxwell in the MDC thus far has been incomplete and portions are still unreadable. On August 27, 2020, after the Government had completed its first three discovery productions, the defense alerted the Government that there were a substantial number of documents in all three productions that Ms. Maxwell was unable to access on the hard drives that had been sent to the MDC, and even proposed possible technological solutions that we thought might alleviate the problem. Later that same day, the defense sent the Government a follow-up letter listing the unreadable documents and requesting that the Government immediately reproduce to Ms. Maxwell a new set of all of the discovery materials produced to date in a format that she could access on her computer at the MDC, and shipped a new hard drive to load the replacement production.

The new hard drive was not made available to Ms. Maxwell at the MDC until the late afternoon of September 9, 2020, almost two weeks later. While some of the previously unreadable documents were fixed, Ms. Maxwell still could not access a substantial portion of the discovery materials. The defense sent another letter to the Government on September 21, 2020, listing the unreadable documents and demanding that the problems be addressed. On conference calls on September 22, 2020 and September 29, 2020, the Government advised that it was working on resolving the issues, but that the defense could, in the meantime, create its own laptop computer with a copy of the production that it could bring to the MDC to review the discovery with Ms. Maxwell. The defense responded that, while it would create the laptop, it was the Government’s responsibility to ensure that Ms. Maxwell had a complete set of readable discovery which she could access at the MDC herself, without defense counsel present.

It was not until October 2, 2020 that the Government created a replacement set of the unreadable discovery, which it said it would include on the same hard drive as the next production of discovery materials. That production was only made available to Ms. Maxwell in the MDC yesterday afternoon, almost three weeks since the production date. The Government also advised that it had asked MDC legal counsel to send an IT staff member to examine the computer and load any necessary software to view the files on the existing hard drives. But the IT staff member did not look at the computer until October 7, and did not fix the problem. Instead, the IT staff member collected Ms. Maxwell’s computer and hard drives and kept them for two days. When Ms. Maxwell inquired about them, the IT staff member said he had been too busy to look at them. And when they were finally returned to Ms. Maxwell in the afternoon on October 9, several files were still unreadable. As of the date of this letter, Ms. Maxwell still does not have a complete, readable set of the discovery produced to date, which severely impairs her ability to prepare her defense. Accordingly, we ask the Court to order the Government to address this problem immediately.

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