Federal prosecutors do not have the sex tape that sits at the core of their conspiracy and extortion case against state Sen. Dalya Attar, her brother Joseph Attar, and Kalman Finkelstein, a Baltimore police officer, according to a new filing from Dalya Attar’s attorney.

Prosecutors allege that in 2020 the trio secretly recorded Dalya Attar’s former political consultant in bed with a married man and then conspired to blackmail the consultant to keep her sidelined in future elections. Four unnamed co-conspirators are also listed in the indictment as having helped carry out the alleged extortion scheme.

All three defendants pleaded not guilty to all the charges last month.

In the filing, which seeks to dismiss some of the charges against the trio, Attar’s attorney reiterated the senator’s earlier claim that she and her family are the real victims. The attorney also stated the government learned of the video from a surreptitious audio recording made by the married man.

Joseph Attar, who also goes by Jay and Yossi, and the married man met in December 2021, according to the indictment, where Attar showed the man the video and threatened to release it to friends and family unless the consultant agreed to leave Dalya Attar alone. The married man is referred to in court filings as Victim 2, the consultant as Victim 1.

“It is Victim 2, and Victim 2 alone, who reports that this fleeting display included intimate images of him and Victim 1 engaging in intercourse nearly two years earlier,” wrote A. Jeff Ifrah, Dalya Attar’s attorney. “The Government unquestioningly accepted Victim 2’s allegation as true and relied on it to form the basis of a federal indictment, despite having no other direct evidence of the existence of the alleged illegal recording.”

Ifrah called it ironic that the government’s case involved an allegedly illegal wiretap made by one of the victims. Prosecutors’ indictment stated that Joseph Attar told the married man he had “hours of footage of you in bed.”

Also revealed in the filing is that the married man was designated a confidential informant for the federal government, though he was not one at the time the 2021 meeting took place.

Ifrah’s filing also expanded upon claims Dalya Attar made in a since-deleted social media post that she and her family are the real victims in the case.

Dalya Attar fired the consultant from her campaign in 2018 “for cause,” Ifrah wrote, which led the consultant to embark on a “campaign of harassment.” Attar, 35, a Democrat representing West Baltimore, was first elected to the House of Delegates that year. She was appointed to a vacant state Senate seat in January.

The consultant threatened to cause the senator and her family “economic and reputational harm,” and went so far as to show up “uninvited at restaurants,” the Attars’ parents’ home and “other unexpected locations for the sole purpose of haranguing Senator Attar,” according to the filing.

In October 2018, the consultant sent Attar a message that read, “When u least expect it, expect it. Goodbye. This is my final warning,” according to Ifrah’s filing.

The revelations in Tuesday’s filing were meant to undergird Ifrah’s argument that the extortion charges against the three should be dismissed.

The actions outlined in the indictment don’t center on an object of economic value, like a piece of property, for example, which does not fit the criminal statute for extortion, according to Ifrah’s filing.

“The Indictment cannot sufficiently allege the elements of extortion under either federal or Maryland state law,” Ifrah wrote. “Rather, the allegations in the Indictment illustrate that the Defendants simply sought to be free of harassment and antagonization from Victim 1. The value of that freedom — while of legitimate interest to the real victims in this case — does not constitute a transferable property interest required for federal charges.”