Spanier Dec. 17 2013

Former Penn State President Graham Spanier arrives in Dauphin County Court Dec. 17, 2013 for a hearing on an alleged cover-up of the Sandusky case.

(Joe Hermitt, PennLive.com/file)

Former Penn State President Graham Spanier has opened a new battlefront in his war to avoid criminal prosecution for his alleged role in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.

In a filing Monday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Spanier's attorneys asked federal judges to permanently block the state's prosecution of perjury, obstruction of justice and other charges.

Spanier and his former top aides Tim Curley and Gary Schultz are charged with failing to report a 2001 sexual abuse accusation against Sandusky to police or child welfare authorities and, years later, deceiving state investigators as to what they knew of that incident when they were closing in on the longtime Penn State defensive coordinator.

The new Spanier motion - considered unusual, albeit not unprecedented - comes even as separate pre-trial motions in the

Sources familiar with the Spanier camp's thinking said the request for federal intervention, which rarely

occurs in state cases,

is intended as a supplement to the pending state arguments; not a substitute for them.

In Monday's filing Spanier's attorney, Elizabeth Ainslie, specifically asks the federal court to intervene on grounds that the state Attorney General's office filed its charges against Spanier "in bad faith," and after egregious violations of Spanier's right to counsel.

Ainslie's argument largely dovetails with her previous assertions that Spanier was improperly left to testify before a state grand jury in April 2011, thinking he was represented by then-Penn State general counsel Cynthia Baldwin.

Baldwin, minutes before but outside Spanier's presence, had told lead Sandusky prosecutor Frank Fina and the supervising grand jury judge, Barry Feudale, that she was representing the university solely.

But when Spanier identified Baldwin as his lawyer at the start of his testimony, Ainslie argues, no one clarified the point for him.

Ainslie asserts that as a result, Fina essentially gained uncounseled testimony from Spanier, and the resulting charges were filed in violation of the due process clause of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Prosecutors have fought just as strenuously to keep their case intact.

They argue Baldwin properly represented Spanier, Curley and Schultz in their capacity as agents of Penn State. But when she learned later that the administrators' interest in the case was different from the university's, her duties to Spanier, Curley and Schultz ended.

Penn State has subsequently waived its attorney-client privilege to permit Baldwin to testify about her work during the Sandusky probe.

Hoover, in separate motions pending in Dauphin County court, is also considering whether the Penn State administrators were denied counsel, or whether Baldwin violated attorney / client privilege when she testified before the grand jury in October 2012.

In that motion, the defense is seeking dismissal of most of the charges lodged against the Penn State administrators.

Attorneys for Curley and Schulz did not participate in the federal filing, and Attorney General Kathleen Kane's office - which has inherited the Penn State cover-up case from her predecessor Linda Kelly's staff - declined comment.