I want to share a few more thoughts about yesterday’s news out of the defunct Broadview Six case, specifically the all-but-unprecedented release of the transcript of the grand jury sessions from which the indictments came. This was always a case of wild over-charging at a minimum. And that raised the question of just how prosecutors managed to get the case through a grand jury, even with how low a bar that usually is. Well, now we know. They cheated. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.
As David Kurtz notes here, this case seemed fuzzier than most of the other Trump retribution prosecutions. While the indictments singled out a Democratic candidate and lawmaker and those closely associated with them, none of those were high-profile Trump “enemies” like Tish James or James Comey. The prosecutor who initially led the case showed no signs of being especially Trumpy. Defense attorneys tried from the beginning to pry free evidence of White House and/or DOJ interference or direction in bringing the case. But prosecutors said they looked and there was no communication about it. The judge accepted that statement at face value.
It was almost certainly false.
There is reporting suggesting, though not quite nailing down, that the case originated when right-wing influencers noticed the presence of then-congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh at a raucous protest outside an ICE facility in suburban Chicago. Through her work at Media Matters, especially dogging the career of Tucker Carlson, she was a known and much vilified figure among hard core MAGA influencers. They tweeted about it to Pam Bondi and others.
We’ve learned subsequently about the role of Aakash Singh, who seems to be the point man for the Trump DOJ directing and/or strong-arming U.S. attorneys offices to pursue the Trump agenda, political retribution cases and commit official misconduct. We know that Singh was in contact with the Chicago office about this case. We know that Singh had told U.S. attorneys offices to try to do things like what lead prosecutor Sheri Mecklenburg and U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros did in fact do.
So we have the outlines of how this all went down. But we don’t yet have the hard evidence. Everything lines up according to an expected script. But that hard connective evidence is mostly lacking. That’s only going to come if there’s a real investigation. And the judge in the defunct Broadview case seems poised to conduct one, or at least make a serious attempt at it. A big question is whether any of the attorneys possibly facing disbarment are going to decide to talk. If one does, things could move very fast. But given the potential sanctions in play that doesn’t seem likely, at least not yet.
I want to zoom in for now on U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros. Last week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went on Twitter to give Boutros his unqualified support amidst mostly Democratic calls for him to resign. Boutros responded with a particularly fluffery and Trumpy response thanking Blanche for his support.
It seems highly likely that Boutros lied to the judge the day the case finally collapsed. If he didn’t lie with the open-and-shut clarity required in a perjury case, he certainly willfully mislead her. He went into court in person and apologized to the judge for the misconduct that had been uncovered. But he insisted that he was only then finding out about it.
Again, it seems highly likely that that is not true. That’s for two reasons. First there is clear evidence both in the grand jury proceedings and in reliable reporting that Boutros’ office found out about at least some of the misconduct in real time and took steps to clean it up. It seems very unlikely that Boutros wasn’t looped in on those efforts and what made it necessary. Meanwhile Boutros’ own appearance before the grand jury on the morning of the day they finally handed down the indictment suggests he participated in the pressure campaign which resulted in the misconduct.
Boutros went before the grand jury, asked if anyone had strong views about issues like immigration and invited those people to leave. It’s what Mecklenburg did in the grand jury, what Singh told U.S. attorneys offices to do when grand juries got unruly. We already had the transcript of that conversation. Boutros tried to create a lot of deniability. But looked at in the full context it seems clear that Boutros was aware of the absolute need to get this indictment and on the third try decided to add his own weight to it, while trying as well as he could to keep his fingerprints light.
All the evidence suggests that Boutros knew about and was part of the pressure campaign, participated in it, and knew about the misconduct that was spurred by it.
Then there’s the arguably more serious misconduct tied to the subsequent redaction of the transcript, a clear-cut effort to mislead the judge about the case and prevent the defense from learning about the prosecutorial misconduct. That redaction came under lead prosecutor William Hogan, who replaced Mecklenburg after she was detailed to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hogan is known as very Trumpy. He also has a spotty ethical record. He was once fired from the U.S. attorney’s office for misconduct but eventually won his job back in a proceeding before an administrative judge. He is also handling the investigation into E. Jean Carroll, which … yes, is being handled out of the Chicago office. He seems like the guy Boutros is going to for help on the cases D.C. wants handled.
Boutros clearly wants to keep his job, and Blanche wants him to fight for it. So a lot is going to come out of just what comes out of Judge April Perry’s courtroom. That investigation (in the generic not the technical sense) is for now where we are likely to get the most important information about the details of DOJ/White House involvement in this case and the larger map of DOJ corruption of prosecutions and U.S. attorneys offices across the United States.