Federal prosecutors argued Friday that child sex trafficking charges against a Minneapolis GOP political donor should not be dismissed, rejecting his allegations that law enforcement improperly listened to jail phone conversations between the man and his attorneys.

Attorneys for Anton "Tony" Lazzaro asked U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz in June to dismiss a 10-count indictment against him or bar certain investigators from the case based on allegations that FBI and Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) analysts accessed seven recordings of attorney-client calls since his incarceration in the Sherburne County jail.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Melinda Williams on Friday wrote that "there is no basis" for dismissing the indictment or imposing sanctions in the case, adding that "no evidence exists to show that the government intentionally intruded into the defendant's attorney-client communications or that the defendant suffered any prejudice from any limited, inadvertent disclosure of his attorney-client communications."

Lazzaro is charged with conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, five counts of sex trafficking of minors, one count of attempted sex trafficking of a minor and three counts of obstruction of justice. He was charged alongside former University of St. Thomas student and former campus College Republicans chair Gisela Castro Medina, who is accused of recruiting underage girls for a sex-trafficking conspiracy with Lazzaro. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Lazzaro has been held in Sherburne County since August 2021. Williams wrote Friday that he has made "thousands of recorded jail calls" during that time. The government's filing also included signed declarations from the FBI specialist and BCA analyst who have respectively been monitoring his calls.

Mary Cunningham, the FBI's tactical specialist, wrote that it "is not uncommon for there to be more than 50 calls on any given day," noting that Lazzaro made 705 calls in January 2022 alone. Prosecutors said six of the calls accessed by the FBI were the result of inadvertent "mis-clicks" on a spreadsheet of calls in which Cunningham selected calls associated with an attorney's phone number that hadn't been identified as such.

Cunningham immediately closed out of the recordings, according to the court filing. The seventh recording in question was accessed by the BCA analyst, who listened to 10 seconds of a call before closing the recording upon hearing a name similar to one of Lazzaro's attorneys.

Lazzaro is next scheduled to appear in court on Aug. 4 for a hearing on his motions related to the jail calls.