Federal judge dismisses extortion counts against first Orthodox Jewish Maryland state legislator

A federal judge tossed six of eight counts, including counts of extortion, against Dalya Attar, a Maryland state senator who is the first Orthodox Jew in the state legislature.

Stephanie Gallagher, a U.S. district court judge, wrote on Friday afternoon that the court “does not condone the conduct alleged in the indictment,” but that the court had to dismiss the extortion counts, since federal law “does not criminalize it.”

The state senator, 35, and two codefendants still face charges of conspiracy and of intercepting electronic communications.

The case centers on Attar, her brother Joseph Attar, and Baltimore police officer Kalman Finkelstein, who prosecutors say tracked and secretly taped Dalya Attar’s former consultant in bed with a married man.

The former consultant was allegedly threatened that the recording would be shared with her family if the consultant didn’t agree to stop talking publicly about alleged campaign finance violations by Attar, according to documents that the Baltimore Banner viewed.

All three defendants pleaded not guilty.

Attar’s attorneys have said that the former consultant has engaged in a “prolonged campaign of harassment” against “Attar and her family, relentlessly texting them with threats to cause economic and reputational harm” and “even showed up uninvited at restaurants, at the home of Senator Attar’s parents and at other unexpected locations for the sole purpose of haranguing Senator Attar.”

A former criminal defense attorney and former state representative, Attar is in her first term in the state Senate after being appointed in 2025 to fill a vacancy.

She lost a bid for election to a full term in the state Senate in the Democratic primary last month. That race involved accusations of Jew-hatred against a well-known supporter of Attar’s primary opponent, who complained that rabbinical leaders urged Orthodox Jews in Attar’s district to change party affiliation to vote for Attar in the closed Democratic primary.

Raised in a Sephardi family in Baltimore, Attar twice won election in the lower House of Delegates. She was the first Orthodox Jew elected to the Maryland General Assembly, the state’s House.

Gallagher ruled on Friday that extortion did not apply, since the threat did not involve anything of monetary value.

“In the context of this statute, the word ‘extort’ must limit ‘any money or other thing of value’ to only tangible, transferable things and not forbearance, consistent with the common law definition of extortion,” she wrote.

Prosecutors argued unsuccessfully that existing case law allows for other things of value besides money to be applied to the legal definition of extortion.

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