Justice Department rushes to defense of Chicago US attorney after weeks of turmoil

By Katelyn Polantz, CNN

(CNN) — After two weeks of turmoil at the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Illinois, the acting attorney general has jumped in to publicly defend his leader on the ground in Chicago, Andrew Boutros.

Boutros, an ambitious, boastful, longtime line prosecutor-turned-defense attorney in a city filled with storied legal careers, came under fire when his office’s alleged mishandling of a high-profile investigation into a group of Democrat politicians known as the Broadview Six became public.

Then, as his office was still dealing with the blowback, it was revealed Boutros’ office was overseeing the controversial investigation around E. Jean Carroll, President Donald Trump’s foe and sexual assault accuser.

The negative attention has led Boutros — who had worked in mainstream law firms before becoming Trump’s pick in Chicago and, according to attorneys who know him, had not shown partisanship previously in his career — to become weary of those in his office and of his contemporaries in the city’s legal community.

“This Department fully supports U.S. Attorney Boutros and his efforts to combat violent crime, drug trafficking, immigration violations, and fraud, and we look forward to more great work from his office,” Blanche said in a social media post on X on Thursday, the same day the president gave him the nod he’d nominate him to stay in the job.

Boutros responded to Blanche in his own post, thanking him for his support and criticizing what sources say he now believes in a coordinated effort to sabotage him.

“We have fixed — and continue to fix — an Office I inherited in April 2025 that was doing less than even the bare minimum, as widely reported in the press at that time,” Boutros wrote on Thursday on X.

“I am grateful to all of you,” Boutros also wrote, thanking prosecutors and other colleagues who have supported him, “and I will not forget how you all stood by me when others capitalized on the opportunity to attempt to destabilize the Office … under the guise that they love or even really care about this incredible and storied Office.”

The alliance between Boutros and Blanche isn’t likely to stop concerns that the prestigious US attorney’s office in Chicago is in crisis, or end a judge’s inquiry into its handling of the Broadview Six case.

It has also highlighted what some Justice Department critics say is grand jury abuse by the Justice Department in efforts around the country to appease Trump’s political vendettas.

The Broadview Six fallout

It was two weeks ago when the grand jury scandal in the Broadview Six case was unearthed, leading the Justice Department to drop the indictment of several politicians who had been arrested on charges they impeded federal officers outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Broadview, Illinois, in September.

Court proceedings ratcheted up this week as a judge attempts to uncover what happened in the grand jury room ahead of the indictment.

Defense attorneys in the Broadview Six case say they believe what they’ve uncovered shows a cavalier, problematic and politicized approach and that the Trump Justice Department is bent on securing criminal charges against critics of the president.

Chris Parente, a defense lawyer for Broadview Six defendant Brian Straw, an elected trustee of a municipality near Chicago, says what’s come to the surface in Chicago raises concerns about how the Justice Department has secured indictments in other high-priority cases against Trump’s foes — including those against former FBI director James Comey and others.

“You have Todd Blanche out there telling everybody, ‘Don’t worry about [the] grand jury indictments of Comey, Don Lemon, Southern Poverty Law Center,’” Parente said, pointing to how the acting attorney general has attempted to shield criticism of the ongoing cases against Trump enemies by pointing to the secrecy and independence of grand juries, rather than the Justice Department’s choices.

A Justice Department official based in Washington said on Friday it was “absurd” to suggest the department would factor in the Broadview Six defendants’ politics.

Court proceedings in Chicago since mid-May and statements by the US attorney’s office have revealed problems before the previously confidential grand jury proceedings, on multiple levels.

A prosecutor — and potentially Boutros himself — suggested to grand jurors who had made up their mind to leave the grand jury.

Those statements happened in October after the grand jury first voted against indicting the Democratic officials. In one of the sessions, a lower-level prosecutor removed grand jurors from the grand jury, then the US attorney’s office abruptly ended the grand jury session, the US attorney’s office has said in court, according to transcripts obtained by CNN.

A prosecutor in the office also was “vouching to the grand jurors” for the strength of the Justice Department’s evidence in the case, rather than letting the grand jury weigh it impartially, the judge and the US attorneys’ office said in court, and was allegedly improperly communicating with grand jurors outside of the grand jury room, according to the transcripts. That prosecutor no longer works in the office.

“I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” the judge said at a May 21 hearing, describing what she saw in grand jury transcripts from the sessions in October as the case was nearing indictment.

The situation has led multiple elected officials from Illinois to call for Boutros’ resignation in recent days — with the pressure on him as his office also pursues a criminal investigation around E. Jean Carroll, the magazine columnist who previously accused Donald Trump of assault and won a large defamation verdict against the president.

Other sources have noted to CNN that William Hogan, the prosecutor in Boutros’ office who submitted heavily redacted grand jury transcripts to the court last month, raising the judge’s suspicions of how the case was handled, is the same prosecutor leading the inquiry around Carroll.

Boutros tried to tamp down criticism with a public statement after the CNN report on an E. Jean Carroll investigation. He and the Justice Department have said his Chicago office “has not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll.”

The Broadview Six redactions were what Judge April Perry said she saw as “the most problematic,” according to a court transcript, because the judge received those transcripts from the US attorney’s office recently in a way that obscured some of the alleged prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury agreed to indict.

“Mistakes happen. They happen to all of us,” Perry also said in court. “What you do not do is hide it … I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”

Hogan in court on May 21 said he would “take responsibility for” the redactions.

Blowback for Blanche

The Broadview Six situation is likely to increase the scrutiny of Blanche, too.

Defense attorneys are attempting to uncover the Justice Department’s decision-making as it struggled to bring charges, and the reasons why prosecutors and Boutros interacted with the grand jurors as they did.

Perry now is considering sanctioning prosecutors in court, with proceedings and legal arguments about the Justice Department’s conduct set to continue at least into July, even though the case is dismissed. Justice Department prosecutors, in Chicago and elsewhere, could potentially be called into court for testimony.

The judge also is fielding a request from defense attorneys for records of Boutros’ office being in contact with the Justice Department’s Washington, DC, leadership, including Blanche’s office when he was deputy attorney general last fall.

The defense lawyers seek “to know whether or not the orders to pursue this sham political prosecution came from Washington, and how closely officials in the main Department of Justice were tracking or encouraging developments in this case,” Parente said in a statement yesterday.

A Justice Department official said on Friday that the anti-Trump immigration enforcement and Democratic politics among those in the Broadview Six weren’t part of the investigation or charging decisions at all.

And, the Department has said the US attorney’s office didn’t communicate with Justice Department leadership in Washington about who the defendants in the case were “after a draft indictment was approved internally.”

Pressure on Boutros

Since the Broadview Six case fell apart, Boutros has faced the uphill battle of trying to defend himself, and his office’s work, against allegations of political maneuvering.

That effort became even more fevered after CNN and other outlets reported the existence of a criminal inquiry linked to Carroll. No charges have emerged, but public officials opposed to the Trump administration have harshly criticized the inquiry.

“After [Carroll], he started to crack at the seams,” one person familiar with his thinking told CNN, noting that Boutros became fearful that someone in his office was leaking to reporters.

Democrats in Illinois and several former prominent alumni of the US attorney’s office, who are now largely in the close-knit Chicago defense bar, have been highly critical of Boutros and his US attorney’s office, which has seen several of its assistant US attorneys leave during his tenure.

Three people familiar have told CNN that Boutros, who is not Senate confirmed, expressed serious concerns to associates that people are gunning to muddy his name.

Boutros has issued several unusual, lengthy statements, including a “special report” he says his office conducted of the Broadview Six grand jury proceedings, after the Justice Department asked the court to dismiss the indictment and bar it from being brought again.

The five-page report acknowledges that Boutros visited the grand jury, a rare move by any US attorney, in October last year, after that jury had declined to approve the Broadview Six case two weeks earlier.

He asked grand jurors to raise their hands if they were “struggling with a certain type of cases, such as the immigration cases or other cases where they do not believe that they can set aside their personal, their personal emotions,” according to a portion of the transcript the US attorney’s office made public in the report.

The grand jury then approved the Broadview Six indictment that day, court records show.

An assistant US attorney in Chicago has told the court that Boutros’ appearance wasn’t related specifically to the Broadview Six case, and that he consulted with the chief judge before visiting the secret session.

Parente, representing the Broadview Six defendant, told CNN this exchange defied logic, especially given that Boutros highlighted immigration cases before the grand jury.

“You’re never going to convince me it was a random time that he showed up in the grand jury that day,” Parente said this week.

The defense lawyers have made this argument to Perry as well, and the judge is still collecting information about Boutros’ and his prosecutors’ grand jury approach.

Boutros also appeared at the court hearing on May 21 when Perry, herself a former Chicago federal prosecutor, questioned the prosecutors’ work and summarized on the record the grand jury misconduct.

“It is my very sincere belief, Your Honor, that no prosecutor acted intentionally in misleading you, and that there was no desire to mislead the Court and no deliberate misconduct on the part of the prosecutors,” Boutros told the judge at the hearing.

At the end of that hearing, the case was dismissed.

CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz and Paula Reid contributed to this report.

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