Reza Zarrab, taped in jail, said lying was ticket to freedom

Reza Zarrab, the government’s star witness in the trial of a Turkish banker accused of violating United States sanctions on Iran, was recorded in a 2016 jailhouse phone call saying that one needed to lie “in America in order to make it out of prison,” according to a summary of the conversation released on Monday.

“Reza says in such a country, in order to get out or get a reduced sentence, you need to admit to crimes you haven’t committed,” the summary says.

The summary was contained in a public court filing by lawyers for the Turkish banker, Mehmet Hakan Atilla. It was part of a letter to the judge in which the lawyers complained that prosecutors had withheld summaries of five audio recordings and other potentially critical evidence for several days beyond a deadline the judge had set.

Read the whole story from The New York Times.

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