‘A Credibility Crisis’
The prosecutorial misconduct with the grand jury in the Broadview Six case is threatening otherwise unrelated cases handled by the same prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg.
In a move that is likely to bring even more scrutiny to U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ office, U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman of Chicago scheduled an evidentiary hearing for June 17 over alleged grand jury misconduct by Mecklenburg in a high-profile COVID-testing fraud case.
Defense lawyers allege that Mecklenburg vouched for the evidence, disclosed off-the-record negotiations with a defense attorney, and used “inflammatory characterizations of the defendants, including name-calling and folk-wisdom metaphors.”
Coleman opened the door to the defense counsel calling witnesses at the hearing, including potentially Boutros himself, the Sun-Times reports:
The judge also told [Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur] there are “a lot of people in your sphere that I’m assuming are going to be asked to come testify, and you may want to avoid that.” The judge didn’t say out loud how MacArthur could avoid it, but she said MacArthur knows what to do.
The judge’s apparent implication was that the prosecutors would do well to dismiss the tainted case.
The Chicago Tribune put it all in a uniquely Chicago context:
If the evidentiary hearing goes forward, it would be the most significant inquiry into potential prosecutorial misconduct by the U.S. attorney’s office since the mid-1990s, when a trio of judges concluded that Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan and others had improperly given favors — including conjugal visits in government offices — to cooperators against leaders of the violent El Rukn street gang.
More than 30 years later, Hogan is at the center of the Broadview Six controversy after taking over the case in February when Mecklenburg left the office for a job in Washington, D.C.
By his own admission, Hogan was responsible for the misleading redactions in the grand jury transcript in the Broadview Six case that so infuriated U.S. District Judge April Perry and has her considering sanctions.
In a separate case this week, lawyers for a man serving a three-year prison sentence for bank fraud asked U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland to review the transcripts of his grand jury, which was also handled by Mecklenburg.
Judge Rowland agreed to review the transcripts, despite the man’s 2023 guilty plea: “The front office has created, as you know, a credibility crisis, and that is a real problem,” the judge told the prosecutor.
Judge Declines to Block Trump Slush Fund
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of D.C. decided to take the Trump administration at its word (I know, but there’s at least a method to the madness) that the anti-weaponization slush fund is dead. After a brief hearing of less than 30 minutes, Leon ruled from the bench that if the slush fund is really dead then the case is moot and he has no jurisdiction to take action against it.
The ruling, while a win for the administration, came with a warning from Leon that it had now made representations to the court in writing and in arguments that he would hold it to.
After the hearing, I spoke with the lead attorney for the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which brought the lawsuit, and he acknowledged that one of the group’s goals was to get a ruling on mootness in order to box in the administration. After acting Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to commit in writing to Congress that the slush fund is dead, DOJ had to make that commitment in this case, and now Judge Leon can hold them to it.
Still, the biggest threat remains that the White House and DOJ will come up with a workaround, an alternative mechanism like the Federal Tort Claims Act, to pay off the Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies, a way of sidestepping the judge and their prior commitments not to proceed.
For more on the hearing:
David Kurtz goes live after hearing to block Trump’s slush fund by TPM
A recording from David Kurtz’s live video
Read on SubstackQuote of the Day
“Don’t play possum with this court.”—U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, warning the Trump DOJ that it better not just be pretending that the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is dead
The Situation Room?
I struggle to get past the opening anecdote from this excerpt of the new book by NYT reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Top administration officials used the Situation Room last summer for a meeting on containing the political fallout from the Epstein scandal — and, as if to demonstrate that the White House and Main Justice were no longer distinct entities, the upper ranks of DOJ participated in the meeting:
- Attorney General Pam Bondi
- FBI Director Kash Patel
- Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche
- Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr.
- DOJ deputy chief of staff James Blair
Out of this meeting came Blanche’s infamous jailhouse interview of Ghislaine Maxwell.
The Retribution: The Banks
Another Trump grievance has come to forefront: Banks closing his accounts after the Jan. 6 coup attempt.
Trump signed an executive order back in August targeting the banks, and he and his family later filed suits against Capital One and JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon.
Now, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has subpoenaed a slew of banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, about whether they improperly closed customer accounts for political reasons, the WSJ reports.
Pirro reportedly launched her investigation on her own, without a referral from bank regulators, and is using the same two hand-picked prosecutors she assigned to the politically motivated investigation of the Federal Reserve and its then-chair Jay Powell.
The Retribution: Michigan Protestors
Trump DOJ is bringing unusual federal conspiracy charges against pro-Palestinian protestors with ties to the University of Michigan, raising the stakes in the administration’s push to criminalize dissent, opposition, and political views it disfavors.
The Corruption: Trump’s Crypto Craze
It’s tails Trump wins, and heads investors lose, according to a new analysis from Reuters:
A Reuters examination shows that the Trump family has used this template to generate at least $2.3 billion in profit from investors since Trump retook the presidency. On the other side of that cash bonanza for America’s first family: the more than a million investors whose net losses totaled $2.3 billion at the end of April, according to a Reuters analysis.
On Morality and Voting
Brian Beutler chews over Graham Platner:
Voting, particularly in a two-party democracy, is about harm reduction. Even when candidates are inspiring and well-intentioned, voting is still about harm reduction, because politics is highly impure. Superpower politics are especially impure. Voting is utilitarian. It is not like flashing a gang sign. In a contest between a bad candidate and a worse one, voting for the bad candidate is like expressing the moral intuition that someone should amputate a gangrenous leg rather than allow the patient to die.
Boat Strikes Take an Even Darker Turn
Amanda Klasing, on last week’s revelation that targeting decisions in the lawless U.S. high-seas campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats don’t factor in whether the boats are carrying drugs or arms:
The presence of drugs or arms on the targeted boats would not change the rights to due process and to life of people on board. It is, however, a baffling admission that this cruel and lethal program is targeting these boats based on criteria other than being in possession of the very items purported in the administration’s already unlawful and dubious justification.
Ebola Watch
Slate’s Jill Filipovic reports from Kenya: “The demise of USAID did not cause this Ebola outbreak. But it is a gift to Ebola. It likely delayed its detection and hampered efforts to deliver tests and treatment to the affected areas. It has broken down meticulously constructed networks of trust and generally slowed the response to the virus.”
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