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. 

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.