Sidney Powell, the attorney representing former national security adviser Michael Flynn, accused the government of trying to force her client to lie.
Her comments came Tuesday night during an interview on the Fox News show "Hannity."
"They've been abusing their power for the last year in spades," she said. "The reason this all came to this is because they tried to get him to lie in the prosecution of United States vs. [Bijan] Rafiekian — his former business partner — and with new counsel standing by his side, of course, there was no way I was going to let him do that and he didn't want to do that."
Flynn filed court papers on Tuesday to withdraw his guilty plea. The request came after the Justice Department changed its position on Flynn's punishment by recommending he serve up to six months in jail for lying to the FBI during its probe into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Powell maintained she and Flynn's other representatives "pushed back" against federal prosecutors by presenting them with evidence "for hours showing them all kinds of different things that supported the fact that he was telling the truth."
"It's just been one atrocity after the other," she said about the government's case.
And Powell added that the government's recent sentencing memorandum appeared to be "full of lies and distortions."