In recent posts I’ve been explaining how corrupt leadership of the Justice Department has been seeping down into U.S. Attorneys Offices across the country, sometimes through direct interventions, other times through the general message from the top that using U.S. Attorneys Offices to settle personal vendettas is fine. Our new information comes from a new filing out of the Broadview Six case — specifically, from attorneys for the final four defendants who are now seeking leave of the court to do discovery to get to the bottom of the corruption behind the case and seek sanctions or compensation for legal fees.

First, a little context.

I’ve been bringing you updates on the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago, the current U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and the expanding grand jury misconduct corruption scandal enveloping the office. Of course, this is not limited to Chicago. It’s highly likely, though defense attorneys haven’t yet been able to pry free evidence, that the Broadview Six indictment came down under pressure from Washington, whether that was from the White House, Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security. The deeper corruption of the DOJ is a story me and my colleagues have been reporting on for the last year and a half — cover-ups, retaliation against political adversaries, various flavors of corrupt and criminal conduct.

So it’s everywhere. It’s starts at the top and it trickles down everywhere. But in most cases we’re talking about corruption and misconduct directed from above, from Trump and his top fluffers. But the DOJ is a big, big institution. Lots of people. There are 93 U.S. Attorneys Offices. So there are many flavors of corruption. And I wanted to share with you a slightly different kind. This is courtesy of TPM Reader LS who shared this article from Bloomberg Law (which David also flagged in Morning Memo today). It’s about Sigal Chattah, the acting U.S. Attorney in Nevada’s single U.S. Attorney’s office. It’s a wild, wild article. Totally bonkers stuff I was surprised I hadn’t heard about before. But it kind of makes sense since it’s hard to get attention for wild levels of corruption and misconduct and simply absurd behavior in a semi-out-of-the-way U.S. Attorneys office when we’re seeing examples of the same every day at Main Justice.

Anyway, here’s the story.

Today Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth called on Chicago U.S. attorney Andrew Boutros to resign charging that his office is adrift in chaos and official misconduct. 

On the one hand this is unsurprising. This is a major and growing scandal. It implicates a Republican president. They’re Democrats. And the office has been at the leading edge of policies (Midway Blitz, mass deportation generally) that are deeply unpopular — certainly in Chicago and to varying degrees across the state. So, as I note, to some agree it’s a predictable development. 

But there are some additional threads I want to remind you of. 

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.

I was thinking last night about the denouement of the Broadview Six case, a collapse which I’m told by some legal observers stands a non-trivial chance of seeing some of the prosecutors disbarred. And I contrasted it with the series of TPM Reader emails about the “fancy lawyers.” A number of these emails start out with some version of, I’m not part of the legal elite, I’m just working here in the trenches as a lawyer in [this or that mid-sized city in the United States]. Or maybe, my background is in elite law but I’m down here in the trenches, etc.