Rat? To ‘El’ with you!
Chapo-wife att'y's fury at fed leak
The lawyer for El Chapo’s wife on Monday blasted the federal sources who spoke to the media about her alleged cooperation, saying that the leak “was designed to kill her family.”
Jeffrey Lichtman — who represented Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and is now defending the imprisoned kingpin’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, 31 — was grilled on reports that the one-time beauty queen is preparing to rat out highranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, including her own stepsons.
“I’m not going to comment on what she is or what she isn’t going to do,” Lichtman said on WABC radio’s “The Other Side of Midnight.”
But the “planting of the story,” he said, is “absolutely the most despicable thing, probably the worst prosecutorial governmental misconduct I’ve ever experienced in 30 years.”
“And I’ve been involved with fabrication of evidence, destroying evidence, lying to judges, lying to juries by the feds, but to actually put this out there is an attempt to murder her and her family,” the attorney said.
“Let’s be clear about this: She’s got two 9-year-old girls that are exposed, obviously, and to put this out there so flippantly is designed to kill them.”
Aispuro and Guzman share 9-year-old twin girls Emali Guadalupe and Maria Joaquina. A federal law-enforcement source told The Post on Saturday that Coronel Aispuro is “definitely cooperating,” adding that she is a likely candidate for witness protection.
“Emma wants to get far away from the violence, and has always wanted to live in the US,” the source said. She was born in California and has dual US-Mexican citizenship.
But Lichtman said that “if there was cooperation that was going on or was about to go on, it’s been destroyed.”
“So you’ve got federal agents that don’t care about the fact that they’ve sworn to uphold the law, have violated it and have destroyed any ability to exploit any cooperation by her,” he said.
And if she was not cooperating, Lichtman said, this “was clearly designed to force her to cooperate, to put pressure on her, to target her family, to make her think that the only choice she has is to cooperate.”
“There’s no question about this that it puts [Coronel Aispuro’s family] in the crosshairs,” he added.
“There’s no doubt that it violated the law. There’s no doubt that it obstructs justice. It is 10 times worse than anything Emma is alleged to have done, which is basically act as a secretary for her husband. She was in her 20s at the time.”
Coronel Aispuro is currently being held in a federal jail in Alexandria, Va.
“I’m researching right now whether we can even make a motion to dismiss the charges based on [this leak],” Lichtman said. “They’re basically attempting to kill her family. And her, as well.”
The glamorous Coronel Aispuro, fond of flashy designer clothes, was a fixture at her husband’s 2019 trial in Brooklyn federal court.
At the time, The Post exclusively reported that she was under federal investigation for helping to run the cartel that is now spearheaded, the source said, by stepsons Ovidio Guzman Lopez, 30, Ivan Archivaldo Guzman, 37, Jesus Alfredo Guzman Salazar, 34, and Joaquin Guzman Lopez, whose age is unknown.