I’m returning to a topic I’ve written about before, the collapsing credibility of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Illinois, and a broader (and justified) crisis of faith in the entire U.S. Department of Justice that’s developed over the last six months.
The scandal du jour is improper contact with Grand Juries by Assistant United States Attorneys. It started with the Broadview Six case, where six protestors were indicted for forcibly impeding a federal officer, as well as under a federal conspiracy statute (carrying a maximum penalty of six years in prison) for crowding and pushing an ICE automobile as they protested ICE’s Broadview facility last September, during the height of the infamous “Midway Blitz.” Most of the people that were indicted were Democratic politicians–including a Congressional candidate, a candidate for Cook County Board, an Oak Park Village Trustee, and a Democratic committee person for Chicago’s 45th Ward.
The case quickly fell apart – the feds announced that they would “narrow and review the conspiracy case” and dropped charges against two of the Broadview Six in March, and voluntarily dismissed the conspiracy charge against the remaining defendants in April.
More critically, during pre-trial proceedings, defense attorneys asked the presiding judge, April Perry (who, as I previously noted on this blog, had already had it with Donald Trump’s shit), to review the Grand Jury transcripts that resulted in the indictments of the Broadview Six.
Prosecutors provided redacted versions of the transcripts, and once the full contents came out, it was easy to see why they wanted to hide what had happened: a prosecutor had improperly put her credibility on the line to support the criminal charges, there were substantive communications with grand jurors outside the grand jury room, and that a prosecutor excused grand jurors who didn’t agree with the case.
I haven’t read the full transcripts, but it sounds like what happened in that Grand Jury room was a prosecutor engaging in aggressive arm-twisting (metaphorically speaking, at least I hope) on a deeply skeptical Grand Jury. According to the Sun Times, one Grand Juror called the case a “crock of shit,” another questioned the actions of the federal officer who supposedly was the “victim” of the Broadview six. Prosecutors dismissed members of the Grand Jury, which is allowed only by the presiding judge. It also took prosecutors three times to secure the indictment, which led one Grand Juror to ask whether the prosecutors got “unlimited tries” to secure an indictment.
It’s a longstanding cliche that any halfway decent prosecutor could “indict a ham sandwich.” First of all, a Grand Jury proceeding isn’t an adversarial proceeding, as in most criminal trials or hearings – the prosecutor gets to present his or her evidence without a pesky defense attorney objecting or cross-examining to poke holes in the prosecutor’s case. Also, the prosecutor only needs to convince a Grand Jury that there is “probable cause” that a crime took place–or to reasonable grounds that a crime has been committed and that this person or persons committed this crime. This is a much lower standard than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to secure a conviction. So even without knowing of prosecutorial misconduct during the Grand Jury, it’s telling that these prosecutors struggled to secure an indictment on this case.
Anyways, once these transcripts came to light, Judge Perry was pissed. She called prosecutors into the court room and basically treated them like children:
“Mistakes happen,” Perry said. “They happen to all of us. But as I tell my children, you own it. You admit to it. You apologize for it, and you move on.
“What you do not do is hide it.”
The United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Andrew Boutros, recently announced that he was instituting an internal review of Grand Jury proceedings going back to 2007, but I have more faith In OJ Simpson’s legendary pledge to find “the real kilers” than I have in Boutros’s ostensible probe.
The attempts to criminalize dissent by prosecuting nonviolent protestors is clearly coming from the very top of the Trump Administration. The New York Times did a comprehensive study of assault charges brought against protestors–over 500 cases under a sparingly used statute. The law seems to be deployed speciously, as over half of these cases have already been dismissed or dropped by prosecutors; usually Federal prosecutors have about a 90% success rate.
The question I have is this. Did this abuse of the Grand Jury system actually begin recently? With hacks like Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche running the show, I can imagine political pressure on rank and file Assistant US Attorneys to get results, regardless of pesky considerations like “Ethics” or “Justice.”
On the other hand, as with many other aspects of the Trump era, it could be that the utter venality with which this administration conducts itself has merely exposed rot intrinsic to the system. It very well could be that Federal Prosecutors have been browbeating Grand Juries for many years to secure indictments, and this has only been exposed by the self-evident corruption of the Broadview Six case.
Whatever the case is, courts around the county are quickly losing trust in DOJ lawyers, which traditionally have been considered the cream of the crop in the legal field. But as one judge put it, “Trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”1
And maybe that’s how it should be.
- In Search of One Device and Two Individuals Under Rule 41, 2025 WL 1587917, at *14. For more quotes of this sort, Judge Paul Friedman of the District of D.C. collected a large number of recent court orders and opinions expressing doubt in the DOJ’s integrity. ↩︎
RayDorl.com 
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