Here’s a story you should pay close attention to. You may have heard of the “Broadview Six” (later reduced to “Four”). It was a case focused on prominent local Democrats protesting at a Chicago-area ICE facility. (One was congressional candidate and influencer Kat Abughazaleh, who lost her primary this spring.) It was a classic over-charging case: A brief chaotic moment around the vehicle of an ICE employee ratcheted up to be a federal felony conspiracy charge. The case has been moving toward trial for like eight months and it was scheduled to go to trial next week.
For the last month, however, questions about the underlying grand jury proceeding have been roiling the case. First that prompted the government to drop the felony conspiracy charge rather than show the judge the grand jury testimony. (It thus went from a felony trial to a federal trial on one misdemeanor charge.) The judge finally saw those transcripts Tuesday night. That led to a closed-door emergency hearing this morning. In rapid succession today, the remaining charges were dropped and Chicago U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros appeared in court personally to apologize to the judge and deny all knowledge of what had happened.
Listen to the abjectness and the under-bussing in Boutros’s comments to the judge: “I was completely unaware of any vouching that took place in the grand jury, and only became aware of it on either April 27 or the 28th … I was unaware of the vouching. I was unaware of the ex parte communications — all except at the moment before we dismissed the indictment, and I made the decision to dismiss that indictment … No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law.”
So what happened? We don’t actually know that yet, though we have a lot of hints. The gist though is that there’s something big bad in those grand jury transcripts and seemingly also (perhaps this is the bigger part of it) in how they were handled or mishandled afterwards, what the judge was told or what lies she was told.
We’ve had many ICE over-charging cases. Almost all of these have fallen apart. Occasional acquittals. Usually they don’t make it to trial. We’ve had cases were grand juries refused to bring charges. But I don’t think we’ve had many or maybe any cases where we (or perhaps even the judges) have gotten a clear look at how the government got charges out of grand juries in the first place. So this is likely not a one-off situation in which one grand jury was tainted. It probably exposes a pattern of behavior, at least in Chicago.
Keep a close eye.