The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois used to be considered one of the best federal prosecutors’ offices in the country, but the last week has shown that Donald Trump’s administration is driving it off the rails.
First, an egregious attempt to prosecute protesters fell apart amid serious allegations of prosecutorial malfeasance. Then, this week, we learned that the office is investigating payments made to the law firm representing E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Donald Trump for millions after accusing him of sexual abuse. The former home of the legendary prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald — known for going after both Al Qaeda and the Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby — is devolving into just another squalid arm of Trump’s vengeance campaign. Which raises the question: How long can decent people continue to work for such a corrupted institution?
In the face of Trump’s attempts to turn the Department of Justice into his legal praetorian guard, many career employees seem to think they can keep their heads down and wait out their new masters. “We are the mole people now,” one department employee told the New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett in his forthcoming book, “The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice.” But at a certain point, it may be impossible to serve both the cause of justice and an unjust government.
If Trump didn’t manufacture scandals on such an industrial scale, the case that collapsed last week in Chicago would have been a huge story. It stemmed from a September protest outside an ICE detention center in suburban Broadview in which demonstrators briefly surrounded a government vehicle and allegedly damaged it. A month after the incident, six local politicians and activists who’d been part of the crowd, including a Democratic congressional candidate, Kat Abughazaleh, were indicted on charges including felony conspiracy, for which they faced years in prison.
The case of the Broadview Six, as their supporters call them, was a naked attempt to criminalize protest, and prosecutors needed three grand jury sessions just to get an indictment. The real scandal, however, was what went on inside the grand jury room.
Apparently, after initially failing to secure an indictment, prosecutors excused grand jurors who rejected the government’s case before trying again. One career prosecutor, the assistant U.S. attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, was accused of “vouching,” essentially leveraging her own credibility with the grand jurors to convince them to trust her evidence, a prohibited practice. Then, when Judge April Perry of Federal District Court asked to review grand jury transcripts, prosecutors provided her with redacted versions that covered up their apparent misconduct.
Last week, after Perry finally reviewed the unredacted transcripts, she said she was “incredibly shocked” by what she’d discovered, exclaiming, “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.” All charges against the Broadview Six have been dismissed, and defense attorneys in the case are now seeking sanctions that would let their clients recover some of their legal fees. Mecklenburg had since been reassigned to work with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee; last week Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, announced she’d been let go.
In response to the debacle, Andrew Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District, who himself was accused of having personal contact with the grand jury, has announced “sweeping reforms to internal grand jury practices and disclosures.” His announcement brought to mind the hot dog meme from “I Think You Should Leave”: “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.”
One puzzling thing about the case is that Mecklenburg was a longtime career prosecutor, not a MAGA apparatchik. Yet she seems to have been willing to behave in ways that have astonished legal observers.
“You really do wonder about the ethical environment that these people are operating under, if this is what we’re seeing,” said Andrew Weissmann, the former deputy to Robert Mueller and author of the new book “Liar’s Kingdom.” Christopher Parente, a defense attorney for one of the Broadview Six, spent almost a decade as a prosector in the Northern District. Now, he said, “I’m worried that no one’s ever going to trust an indictment that comes out of this office again.”
The day after I spoke to Parente, news broke that Boutros’s office has opened a criminal investigation related to E. Jean Carroll’s case. The inquiry is reportedly looking into a nonprofit run by the Democratic billionaire Reid Hoffman, which made a grant to Carroll’s lawyer’s firm. “The investigation, which is expected to look at statements Carroll made during a deposition, could also morph into a criminal perjury probe against the 82-year-old columnist,” reported The Washington Post.
Hoffman’s payment has been public knowledge for years; The Times reported on it in 2023, and Trump’s lawyers tried and failed to make an issue of it during his trial and appeal. It therefore seems fair to assume that the investigation into it is yet another attempt by the administration to go after Trump’s enemies.
The White House’s demands for political prosecutions “are putting career prosecutors into very, very difficult situations,” Barrett told me, forcing people to constantly ask where their red line is. Some in the Justice Department, he said, make a “Lord of the Rings” analogy. “Most of the people there can still do their jobs well and do good, meaningful work in law enforcement until the Eye of Sauron turns to you,” he said, meaning you get pulled into one of Trump’s vendettas. The problem is that even before that happens, you’re still working for the orcs.
