After weeks of speculation by the public and the media, the attorneys defending a woman accused of pushing her new husband off a cliff in Glacier National Park are laying out their argument — and it tells a story similar to but in several key ways different from that told by the prosecution.

They say Jordan Graham is the real victim, not only of a witch hunt following a tragic accident that led to the death of Cody Johnson, but of a conspiracy involving government attorneys, local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, colluding to deprive her of due process and a fair trial.

Graham currently stands charged in U.S. District Court with first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and making false statements.

In a motion and accompanying brief filed Friday, her attorneys outlined their defense while seeking dismissal of the full indictment, dismissal of the first-degree murder charge, suppression of certain evidence, and/or the denial of the prosecution’s right to present certain arguments at trial.

The linchpin of the defense’s argument is the way they say Graham’s first interview with the FBI on July 16, nine days after Johnson’s death, was mishandled.

According to the motion written by Senior Litigator Michael Donahoe with the Federal Defenders of Montana, the government “selectively preserved evidence by recording only those portions of the defendant’s interrogation it felt would benefit its case,” “presented incomplete evidence to the Grand Jury which rendered it false,” and “deliberately sought to acquire an early tactical advantage ... by deftly refusing to arrest the defendant at the conclusion of her interrogation by the FBI ... only to turn around two months later to proclaim publically [sic] that defendant is ‘a sociopath’ deserving of immediate incarceration.”

He further wrote that no part of Graham’s July 16 interrogation was video recorded, despite taking place at the Kalispell Police Department, where previous interviews of Graham by officers had been video recorded.

“Moreover, although defendant had been at liberty for those two months the government consciously elected to proceed to charge the case by way of unsealed complaint knowing all the while that no Grand Jury would be convened for at least two more weeks,” Donahoe wrote.

Donahoe thus alleged prosecutors “knowingly sought to influence the public ... with negative evidence that, in the ordinary course, would have remained confidential before the Grand Jury.” He made the argument that as a result of the prosecution’s indirect use of the media, Graham will never receive a fair trial.

The motion also accuses prosecutors of seeking the first-degree murder charge in retaliation for Graham exercising her constitutional entitlement to argue for bail and subsequently being released, and that the charge is all part of a ploy for prosecutors to gain an advantage in plea deal negotiations.

It further alleges the FBI interrogator shaped Graham’s statements and manufactured evidence in his polygraph examination report.

But beyond the arguments laid out by the defense, their filings also provide more previously unreleased information in a signed affidavit from Graham and transcripts of her describing what happened in her own words, among other documents.

THE INTERVIEW on July 17 was led by FBI Agent Stacey Smiedala, who had been called in by Agent Steven Liss due to his experience with administering polygraph tests and his interrogation skills. It was Liss who would eventually write the complaint leading to Graham’s charges.

When Graham arrived at the police department, she was introduced to Smiedala by Detective Melissa Smith, with whom Graham had previously spoken. In a signed affidavit, Graham said the three sat around a table, at which point she agreed to a polygraph test. After a few minutes, she said, Smith left the room.

What followed, Donahoe wrote elsewhere in the filings, was an unrecorded interview that lasted for an hour and 25 minutes.

Graham wrote in the affidavit that she was immediately distressed by Smiedala’s body language, saying he put his chair close to hers so when they sat facing one another, their knees were touching. She also said he put his hand on her knee, which was bare as she was wearing shorts.

“I don’t know why he felt the need to touch me, and it made me uncomfortable so I moved my chair back slightly but Agent Smiedala just moved his closer,” Graham wrote. “The entire time I was in the room by myself with Agent Smiedala, he never took his hand off my knee. I kept hoping someone else would come into the room. I thought if there was a third person present he would remove his hand.”

She said Smiedala told her “he was going to treat me just like his daughter,” then leaned in, kept his face very close to hers and stared at her as they talked.

Graham admits in her written statement that she began by telling the same lie to Smiedala that she had already told to several law enforcement personnel.

“Soon however I realized I needed to tell the truth, and so I described in detail the events of the night of July 7, 2013 when Cody fell off a ledge in Glacier Park in what I truly believe was an accident,” she wrote.

While explaining her side of events, Graham said Smiedala kept asking her if she was angry when she talked about being emotional, saying it made her feel like he wanted her to change her story. She claimed that “angry” was the word he most used the entire time she talked to him.

At some point, Graham physically reenacted how she claims Johnson grabbed her and how she pulled away and pushed him back in a single motion.

“When I first read the complaint after I was arrested, I was shocked,” Graham later wrote. “I never told Agent Smiedala that I started to walk away and then decided to turn around and push Cody off the ledge with two hands. Those were his words. That is not what happened.”

It is that explanation of events in Smiedala’s polygraph examination report, in which he states she pushed Johnson in the back with both hands due to her extreme anger, that the defense argues was fabricated evidence.

“After what seemed like a long time, Agent Smiedala told me I had ‘passed’ and he thought I was telling the truth,” Graham wrote.

It was at that point that Smith returned to the room and a tape recorder was turned on. Smiedala then administered Graham with a 12-minute summary interview, having her briefly go over each part of the story that they had been discussing.

After the recorded interview was over, Smiedala left the room for fifteen minutes, returning with a sticky note on which were written more questions. Another 10-minute recorded interview followed.

When the recorder was again turned off, Graham was asked to identify a picture of herself and Johnson entering Glacier National Park in an Audi at 9:15 p.m. July 7 and to draw a picture of the ledge where she and Johnson were standing when she pushed him over the edge.

It was then determined that Graham could be released, and she was sent on her way.

Despite her later statements that she passed a polygraph test, Liss later testified that no actual polygraph was ever administered.

ALSO INCLUDED IN the defense filings is a transcript of Graham’s recorded interviews, the first time Johnson’s death has been described publicly in her own words.

Graham told Smiedala that she and Johnson had gone to church, then headed to Dairy Queen, where she said she was discussing a big surprise for Johnson with his friends.

“I could tell that he just needed a break and so he always wants all of his friends to be around him and I just wanted to plan a big barbecue with all his friends involved and just kind of surprise him and show him that you know, I was still there for him and I loved him,” Graham said. “I wanted to do something for him.”

After that, the couple went home, where Graham said they got into an argument about their marriage, during which Graham said Johnson held her down. In response to another line of questioning, Graham would report that Johnson did not abuse or hit her, but controlled her movements.

“Just kinda pull me and tell me that I’m not leaving until we sit there and talk,” Graham said. “And he would, he would hold me down and I could not get up.”

She also said Johnson had once told her that if he ever hit her she could leave him and never come back.

Following their initial argument at the house, Graham said, Johnson came up with the idea to go for a drive to the park. She said that once there, they walked down Loop Trail, across a bridge and then back to the first trail, where they began arguing.

“I was kinda getting some built up anger. Not very happy that he was talking at me like I was a child when I was trying to tell him how I was truly feeling,” Graham said, at one point stating he was treating her like she was 5 years old.

At that point Johnson began bragging about not being afraid of the cliff, Graham said.

“And he said ‘I could do this with a blindfold on.’ And he said, ‘I could just put it on, take a step but I wouldn’t even fall.’ And I was like, and it just kept going through my head that, um, you are going to fall or something,” she said.

Johnson then tried to grab her arm or jacket.

“I said ‘no.’ I said I am not going to let this happen to me, I am going to defend myself,” she said. “So I kinda, said, ‘let go’ and I pushed, and he went over.”

Between her recorded statements and affidavit, Graham went into more detail about the fatal push.

“I took two and I just pushed, like to get him off me, like pushed. It was, it was two hands,” Graham said, adding after the following question that “They were like. At first I grabbed him over and like pulled and then pushed on the back.”

During one of the recorded interviews, Smiedala asked whether Graham could have avoided pushing Johnson in the first place.

“Okay. So you pull him off. At that point couldn’t you have just walked away from him?” he asked her.

“Yes. Looking back, I mean, like, I guess I could have,” Graham responded.

When asked at one point why she continued to turn around and push Johnson off, Graham said it was mainly because emotions were running so high.

“I was frustrated and I was angry, I was... I was every emotion that I could ever think of all at once and I had never felt like that before, I had never experienced that,” Graham said. “Such high emotions...”

“On an anger scale, 10 being the angriest you have ever been in your life, and one being, you know, not that angry, where did you think you were at that moment?” Smiedala later asked.

Graham responded that she was “probably at 10, the highest ... I have ever been,” then saying “It takes a lot for me to get mad.”

According to Smiedala’s report, Johnson fell 200 vertical feet before coming to rest at the base of the cliff. Graham said that after he fell, she got in the Audi and left the park, heading to her mother’s house to pick up her brother.

FRIDAY’S FILINGS raise as many questions as they provide potential answers to, and many of the details are at odds with the prosecution’s narrative as well as with statements made by friends of Johnson.

Chief among the contradictions is Graham’s assertion of Johnson’s confidence while standing near the edge of the cliff. Johnson’s friend Levi Blasdel has spoken publicly of Johnson’s extreme fear of heights.

“Cody and I went to South America over Thanksgiving two years ago and we stopped in New Orleans. We were at the top of a parking garage and I walked up to the ledge and said ‘Cody, come here and let’s get a picture,” Blasdel said in September. “He wouldn’t come within five feet of the ledge. He was terrified of heights. So the idea of him walking around this edge in the dark is unsettling.”

One piece of information, an observation reported by Liss during his testimony at a Sept. 11 detention hearing, corresponded with a statement also made by several acquaintances of Graham — that she lacks emotion in matters connected with Johnson.

“She came into the Kalispell Police Department, she was informed she was being placed under arrest, she seemed surprised. And then after that made no statements and was just a flat demeanor, there was no emotion subsequent to the arrest,” Liss testified.

“It was about a two-hour ride down here to Missoula and she made no statements other than asking for a little heat in the vehicle, her feet might have been cold.”

Early indications of the defense’s strategy were also evident in the transcript.

During his questioning of Liss, Donahoe referred to the July 16 interview as an “ambush,” talked about Smiedala being chosen for his specific skills and psychological techniques that are “imposed” on the subject of the interview, noting Graham was summoned to the police department without being told “she was going to be subjected to a psychological interview by a skilled FBI agent.”

In the documents filed by the defense, Donahoe makes several statements supporting the defense’s theory that the entire prosecution of Graham has been orchestrated from the very beginning.

“During this initial and most critical interrogation session Jordan began by sticking to her original story that Cody mysteriously disappeared with others,” Donahoe wrote. “Yet in pretty short order Jordan admitted that her previous statements about Cody’s disappearance and whereabouts were indeed false.”

“However, since we have no audio or video recording of the session we cannot determine how long it took Jordan to admit her previous fear based coverup, and/or Jordan’s demeanor or emotional condition when she admitted that she was on the ledge with Cody that night.  Gone forever is Jordan’s first time, spontaneous, unrehearsed version of the events on the ledge, as well as her explanation of why she felt she had to lie about what happened.”

Donahoe called the failure to record all of Graham’s statements a “grand government strategy designed to avoid creating a complete electronic record of the interrogation,” simultaneously referring to the “epic effort by Agent Smiedala to isolate key words that would at a minimum support a voluntary manslaughter theory.”

Due to these issues, the defense argues the indictment should be dismissed on constitutional grounds due to prosecutorial misconduct that “undermined the grand jury’s ability to make an informed and objective evaluation of the evidence presented to it,” and that Graham’s statements to Smiedala as recorded are incomplete, coerced and should be suppressed, never brought before a jury.

The defense also argues that the prosecution did not request that the initial complaint be sealed because it was known the case would likely attract national media attention. Donahoe said during a Sept. 13 motion hearing that it seemed peculiar that instead of just going to a grand jury, the prosecution launched their case through a complaint, “...the virtue of the complaint being that the affidavit would be published.”

“And all of that got played in the press in news cycle after news cycle after news cycle,” Donahoe said.

What all of the defense’s arguments add up to, Donahoe wrote, is that Graham is left with a false choice, where her only real option is to not defend herself at all, but take a plea deal hoping to avoid the possibility altogether of failing at trial and being convicted of first-degree murder.

Reporter Jesse Davis may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at jdavis@dailyinterlake.com.