The feds have reversed course and now say they’re willing to provide evidence being sought by the hotel maid who accused former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her.
In court papers filed yesterday, the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office said Immigration and Customs Enforcement will make “a good-faith effort to be cooperative and resolve this issue without further litigation.”
The feds had initially said they would fight a subpoena for various records that Nafissatou Diallo wants for her civil lawsuit against DSK, who she claims attacked her in the Hotel Sofitel in Midtown last year.
Manhattan federal Judge Paul Crotty yesterday gave both sides until Oct. 4 to hammer out a deal over the requested records, which include audiotapes and transcripts of phone conversations Diallo had with a jailed illegal alien one day after DSK’s sensational arrest.
But if a “mutually agreeable resolution” can’t be reached, the feds say they will seek to quash Diallo’s subpoena on the grounds that the Bronx judge who signed it “lacked subject matter jurisdiction . . . due to ICE’s sovereign immunity as a federal agency of the United States government.”
The Manhattan DA’s Office dropped sodomy and attempted-rape charges against Strauss-Kahn after investigators said they caught Diallo in several lies, but his widely publicized arrest forced him to quit the IMF and forgo an expected run for the French presidency.