Lawyers for the “Broadview Six” late Tuesday asked a federal judge to appoint special counsel to investigate alleged wrongdoing by the U.S. attorney’s office — and possibly prosecute for contempt of court.
The 27-page motion said the investigation should focus on prosecutors’ conduct “during the grand jury proceedings and the ensuing cover-up before this court” and should include everyone who touched the case, including U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, his top deputies, and possibly his supervisors at the Department of Justice.
“Indeed, these steps must be taken in large part because of what appears to be a determined effort to blame a single prosecutor when the misconduct now known … runs much deeper and indeed to the highest levels of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office and likely to the Department of Justice in Washington D.C.,” the motion stated.
The motion warned U.S. District Judge April Perry that if a special prosecutor was not able to dig deeper, blame for the collapse of the Broadview Six case would be laid on a single scapegoat, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, which would be “a convenient outcome for those who are eager to turn the page.”
“The court has the authority, and we think the obligation, to ensure that those responsible for this unique and sorry chapter — a chapter which has dramatically impacted the lives of multiple defendants and enduringly sullied the reputation of the U.S. Attorney’s Office earned over decades — are held to account,” the motion stated.
The motion concluded an untainted special counsel was necessary because the issues involved allegations of contempt and misconduct at high levels in the Justice Department.
“Obviously, no one can credibly investigate themselves,” the motion stated.
The filing was the latest shoe to drop in an evolving scandal that began to unfold last month when the politically charged case against six Operation Midway Blitz protesters melted down in dramatic fashion.
Also Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter demanding that both federal and Illinois state oversight agencies open an immediate investigation into Boutros and his office’s actions.
“Mr. Boutros’s misconduct has done incalculable damage to public confidence in his office, in the Department of Justice (DOJ), and in the rule of law,” Raskin, a frequent critic of the Trump administration, wrote in the letter to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission.
After grand jury transcripts showed what Perry called “shocking” misconduct by Mecklenburg, the prosecutor who obtained the indictment, others in the U.S. attorney’s office were accused by the defense of trying to hide it from the judge by redacting large portions of the proceedings.
Last month, Perry told prosecutors that given what occurred in the grand jury and after, claims of vindictive prosecution that she initially rejected could also deserve a second look.
“I, at the time, was operating on a presumption of regular grand jury proceedings, which these were very clearly not,” Perry said. “So based upon what I’ve seen in the grand jury transcripts, the calculus has changed and it has changed considerably.”
Perry said the defense was “entitled to a briefing and perhaps a hearing on the issue of vindictive prosecution,” in addition to sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct and for potential ethical violations.
Raskin’s letter detailed the meltdown of the Broadview Six case and the “cover-up that followed,” concluding that “Boutros and his team corrupted and contaminated the deliberative process, hollowed out the protection that the Constitution guarantees and violated the would-be defendants’ right to due process.”
“It is imperative that your offices investigate the blatant abuses of the grand jury process that Mr. Boutros has perpetrated,” Raskin wrote.
In response Wednesday, Boutros called Raskin’s letter “incomplete, ill-informed, and severely distorted,” saying there is “no doubt” both agencies will look into the Broadview Six prosecution, “a process that we fully support.”
“When they do so, we are confident that upon careful, unbiased consideration, neither entity will find misconduct by the United States Attorney because there was none,” Boutros said in a written statement.
Boutros has been at the center of the controversy that is virtually unprecedented for Chicago’s vaunted U.S. attorney’s office, long regarded as one of the country’s most professional prosecutorial offices.
A growing list of Democratic politicians have called for Boutros to step down, including both U.S. senators from Illinois, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, who said earlier this month that his office has been “riddled with chaos, deep internal dysfunction, and alleged misconduct.”
Boutros, meanwhile, has defended himself and his office, acknowledging that mistakes were made in the Broadview case but claiming he didn’t know the extent of the wrongdoing before the grand jury until late April, when he immediately moved to dismiss the felony indictment and proceed only on misdemeanors.
Despite the scandal, Boutros has also been given a vote of confidence by acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who praised Boutros in a lengthy social media post last month for “steadfastly” advancing the White House’s mission to make the city “safe for the American people.”
The Broadview Six case was beset by allegations of political interference from the moment the indictment was brought last October, with the defense claiming there was pressure from the top to silence protesters of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
Prosecutors alleged the defendants were part of a group that surrounded an ICE vehicle outside the Broadview facility during a Sept. 26 protest and “banged aggressively” on the vehicle’s side and back windows, hood and doors, and crowded together to impede the vehicle.
But the case completely collapsed on May 21 after Perry was given unredacted transcripts of the grand jury proceedings and held an emergency hearing where she said she had “never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury” that had occurred in this case.
In addition to the request for special counsel, the defense on Tuesday filed a motion laying out potential sanctions at Perry’s disposal and the discovery requests that should be fulfilled in that pursuit, including any emails and communications within the U.S. attorney’s office about the case and anything showing potential interference from the Trump administration.
The defense motion accused the government of trying to avoid turning over those materials by agreeing up front to pay attorney’s fees for the former defendants, which “a cynical observer might suggest … was made largely to avoid having to produce the requested discovery (which appears to have struck a nerve) and a full accounting of its conduct.”
In a statement to the Tribune, attorney Terry Campbell, who represents former Broadview defendant Andre Martin, said “what happened in this case is shocking” and that there are still many missing facts on “what drove this misguided and mishandled prosecution.”
“Given what has been exposed thus far, more sunlight is the only adequate disinfectant,” Campbell said.
Perry has ordered the government to respond to the defense motions by July 7. Due to the extended briefing schedule, a ruling is not expected until late July or early August.
The fact that Perry is in position to decide such thorny issues for the U.S. attorney’s office comes with its own ironic twists.
A former federal prosecutor who overlapped with Boutros in the U.S. attorney’s office, Perry was nominated for U.S. attorney by President Joe Biden as potentially the first woman ever to hold the office.
Though Perry was confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2023, her nomination was blocked by then-Republican Sen. JD Vance, who had put a blanket hold on all U.S. attorney nominees to protest the U.S. Justice Department’s criminal investigations of Trump.
After languishing for more than a year, Perry’s nomination for Chicago’s top federal law enforcement post was pulled, and Biden instead nominated her for federal district judge in 2024. She’s since overseen a litany of hot-button cases, including the lawsuit brought by Illinois officials to stop Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago to help with immigration enforcement last year.
Boutros, who was nominated as U.S. attorney by Trump in March 2025, recently praised his old colleague Perry in an office-wide email after the Broadview Six case was dismissed, saying she represented a “strong and independent federal judiciary that wants to ensure itself and the public that our prosecutors and Office acted properly.”
“Because at the end of the day, our job is not to convict at all costs or even to just convict, but instead to do Justice and to do so while following the rules and respecting the rights of our defendants,” Boutros wrote in the email.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
