Josh Kovensky has a good piece up today on the collapse of the “Broadview Four” nee Six case in Chicago. What started off as yet another case of wild overcharging by the Trump Justice Department and politically motivated prosecution collapsed a week ago when a stunning level of prosecutorial misconduct was revealed in open court and all the remaining charges were dropped. The taint of the misconduct has already spread to other cases. The U.S. Attorney in Chicago, Andrew S. Boutros, has reacted with what he purports are important and until now neglected “reforms” to avoid anything happening like this again. (He has also been accused by one of the defense attorneys in the case of at least some level of involvement with the tainted grand jury.) But according to experts on grand juries, avoiding the levels of misconduct revealed in the case could have been done easily enough by just not breaking some of the most basic rules for how prosecutors must conduct themselves in grand juries.
It’s a galactic mess. But it’s also an example of the corruption of the Trump DOJ seeping down into depths of the Department.
The original lead prosecutor on the case was Sheri Mecklenburg, a 20-year veteran of the Chicago office. From what I can tell, she had a generally good if unremarkable reputation in the office. The understanding I got from defense attorneys in the case is that she appeared generally dismissive of the main conspiracy charge against the original six defendants. In other words, Mecklenburg’s heart didn’t seem entirely in the case. And that wasn’t terribly surprising since she was a longtime veteran of the office and, from what I understand, is known to have generally liberal politics.
To be clear, I’m not buying into the Trumpy assumption that prosecutors are really just political actors using their powers to achieve their political or ideological ends. I simply note this to make the point that she’s not some hard right-wing partisan who you might expect to eagerly jump into Trump-style corruption and misconduct. In any case, from October through February she was running the case and running it aggressively.
But then at the end of February, she abruptly withdrew from the case and took a position as a DOJ detailee working on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Dick Durbin (D-IL). According to reports at the time, there was little if any advance warning about Mecklenburg’s departure to the defense or the judge. It didn’t come up at all in the last hearing in the case before her departure.
When this happened, given the background I noted above, some assumed that she simply did not want to be involved in the case and found a way to parachute out of her involvement while still remaining at DOJ as she approached retirement eligibility. She was replaced by William Hogan, one of the most senior career prosecutors in the office. He’s known for working on gang and mob cases and is generally known for being pretty Trumpy in his personal politics. He is also known for being very aggressive, and himself has a history of serious misconduct for which he was fired from the same office in the early 1990s. (He was eventually reinstated after a five year fight before an administrative law judge.)
What came out, though, in that now-notorious court hearing is that all the key misconduct at the grand jury stage was by Mecklenburg. That hasn’t been adjudicated but this was what a junior attorney working with her said at the hearing. And she was the senior attorney presenting the case to the grand jury. So it could only have been her. The day after the hearing, she was dismissed by Durbin’s office. I’ve spoken to a number of attorneys from the Chicago area who have worked with Mecklenburg professionally over the years and in some cases know her personally to some degree. They’re all kind of stunned that she did this, both ethically but also that she would run such career risks on behalf of a case she likely had little ideological or professional sympathy for. (There is separate apparent wrongdoing tied to the redaction of the grand jury transcript. That’s under Hogan.)
To date, I’ve seen no clear explanation of this aspect of the case. Obviously there are various possible explanations: poor values and ethics, pressure, self-advancement, etc. Mecklenburg is, wisely, not talking publicly. And Boutros’s office is doing its best to throw her under the bus. But it seems to me at some level to be example of the effect of a general rot and disinhibition. When the Attorney General — first Pam Bondi and now the acting AG Todd Blanche — are acting openly in ways that are unethical and even criminal, that is going to have an effect. Boutros, the U.S. Attorney, is known as being Trumpy but he’s a real lawyer in the area, not someone Trump saw on X saying nice things about him. His office has brought a number of indictments, often on the basis at first at least on false ICE testimony. Until now, I don’t think there has been much evidence of bright-line misconduct. But there’s certainly been an aggressive culture of overcharging these cases, most of which have fallen apart.
The point I think is largely the same: Boutros put his office at the service of ICE and Trump. That’s going to involve a lot of rule-bending at a minimum. Perhaps Mecklenburg was under pressure. The word certainly went out within the office that these six needed to be indicted. But that still doesn’t adequately explain why a respected prosecutor would commit what I’m told are easily disbarment-level offenses. The general answer I think is that the leaders, appointees and supervisors set a tone. If they do it, how important is it for me not to? If there are no consequences, why hold back? Rules that go unenforced have little meaning other than as curiosities.
Now, the Broadview case is being referenced in other cases in Chicago and around the country as an example of the Trump-era DOJ’s pattern of misconduct and wrongdoing and as a call for judges to withdraw the assumption of “regularity”, i.e., the general assumption that the government is telling the truth and acting in a proper manner. The recent dismissal of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is another example of that. We’ll see many more.