‘No one can credibly investigate themselves’: Now-cleared ‘Broadview Six’ protesters request special prosecutor

DOJ commits to paying former defendants’ attorneys’ fees as case fallout continues.

Chicago, IL (CAPITOL NEWS ILLINOIS) – Attorneys for the now-cleared “Broadview Six” protesters are asking a federal judge to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate alleged misconduct by those in Chicago’s U.S. attorney’s office and their supervisors in Washington, D.C. — and, if warranted, prosecute them for contempt of court.

If the request is granted, it would be yet another extraordinary move in a case that has been full of remarkable twists, especially in the lead-up to its implosion just before it was set to go to trial last month, and the last few weeks of aftermath.

Last week, U.S. District Judge April Perry cleared the way for the incredibly rare public release of transcripts from inside normally secret grand jury proceedings from last fall, where it took federal prosecutors an astonishing three sessions to secure an indictment from the majority of grand jurors. In the second of the three sessions, one grand juror made clear to the lead prosecutor his feelings on having to hear the same case again:

“I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of s— then and I still think it is,” the grand juror said.

In response, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg dismissed the grand juror, telling him to “have a good evening.” The dismissal of at least one more member of the grand jury, in addition to speaking to two of them outside the grand jury room the next week when they apparently apologized to her — plus inappropriately “putting her personal credibility and trustworthiness on the line in support of the charges,” as Perry put it during a closed-door hearing in late May, amount to alleged prosecutorial misconduct in the case, the judge said

Attorneys for the former defendants are pushing for a special prosecutor in part to interrupt what they allege is the government’s “determined effort to blame a single prosecutor” for the misconduct in the case when they say it actually “runs much deeper.”

Mecklenburg, a near-20-year veteran of Chicago’s U.S. attorney’s office, left her job in February for a Department of Justice assignment staffing the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. After her alleged misconduct came to light last month, Illinois U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, announced her termination.

When she went before the grand jury in October, Mecklenburg was then the lead prosecutor in the case against the protesters who would later become known as the “Broadview Six” for their demonstration outside a federal immigration facility in Chicago’s near-west suburb of Broadview.

But in their 27-page motion field late Tuesday night, defense attorneys again alleged the tainted efforts to secure an indictment from the grand jury went “well beyond the mistake of any single Assistant United States Attorney.” They suggested the efforts were directed by leadership inside the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office, including U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros himself, “and likely to the Department of Justice in Washington D.C.”

“To not appoint a special prosecutor here would enable the government’s strategy to lay all that has happened on a single scapegoat, a convenient outcome for those who are eager to turn the page,” defense lawyers wrote.

‘A cover-up … worse than the crime’

The filing appealed to what Perry stressed multiple times on May 21, the day the case imploded after she’d read the grand jury transcripts.

The judge said she was “incredibly shocked” by the mismatch between a redacted version of those transcripts provided to her by prosecutors a month prior and the full transcripts that included Mecklenburg’s apparent misconduct, and said it she found it to be the “most problematic.” Perry rebuked prosecutors for hiding the misconduct and told them the trust she normally extended to them “has been broken.”

Defense attorneys pointed to both the redactions made before filing the grand jury transcripts to Perry in April, plus their silence on multiple occasions in open court when the judge suggested to defense counsel that the redacted transcripts were only missing a dozen or two lines, which she understood to be the result of “IT issues playing the video” evidence during grand jury proceedings.

“In reality, the transcripts had more than 215 lines redacted,” the defense filing said. “The government knew the extent and content of the missing information in the transcripts yet did not correct this Court’s stated misunderstanding in an obvious effort to avoid drawing attention to the misconduct that the redactions and removed pages were obviously meant to hide from this Court.”

Defense attorneys wrote that the government also knew “the likely result of” disclosure of the grand jury transcripts, including “dismissal of the charges and possible investigation of misconduct before the grand jury.”

“But instead of accepting that consequence, they dug the hole deeper, engaging in a cover-up that is worse than the crime,” they wrote.

The filing also points to Boutros’ “continuing and unqualified support for” the prosecutors who handled the case aside from Mecklenburg, citing his statements to Perry on May 21, when he took the extraordinary step to appear in Perry’s courtroom to drop the remaining charges against defendants.

The U.S. attorney told the judge it was his “very sincere belief … that no prosecutor acted intentionally in misleading you” — a sentiment he echoed later in an office-wide email that described the prosecutors as “courageous,” and “having fought for the rule of law,” which was obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

“Had Mr. Boutros truly just learned of the redactions made by his underlings to cover up the grave prosecutorial misconduct revealed by the transcripts, one would think he would be outraged — or at least inquisitive,” the filing said, suggesting the U.S. attorney should have instead referred them to DOJ’s internal Office of Professional Responsibility for an investigation.

“His unqualified support without any such referral to an investigation begs the question of the extent of Mr. Boutros’s knowledge of, or involvement in, the underlying misconduct and/or subsequent cover up — to include vindictive or political motives behind that conduct originating in Washington D.C,” the attorneys wrote.

‘Chastened’ grand jury

Lawyers for the former defendants also pointed to Boutros’ recent disclosure of a short speech to the grand jury the morning of the third time and final time it heard the case, on Oct. 23, 2025.

In that approximately four-minute monologue, given at the peak of the Trump administration’s Chicago-focused “Operation Midway Blitz” mass deportation campaign, the U.S. attorney acknowledged, “these are trying times, these are emotional times.”

“If there’s anyone here who is struggling with a certain type of cases, such as the immigration cases or other cases where they do not believe that they can set aside their personal — their personal emotions, that they cannot listen and deliberate honestly and objectively, I would ask that you raise your hand and identify yourself, because we have a different procedure for that,” Boutros said.

Apparently, no one raised their hand. But defense attorneys alleged the U.S. attorney’s “personal appearance and pointed comments clearly directed at this case” had chastened the grand jury. And even though they’d already heard the case twice, grand jurors “finally acquiesced and returned an indictment that day.”

The filing also pointed to Mecklenburg’s acknowledgment to the grand jury later that day regarding having improperly spoken to two grand jurors outside of the grand jury room, relaying that “she had accepted apologies from the grand jurors whom she had improperly expelled from the room the week prior, rather than the apologies going from her to them.”

“This underscores the fact that Mr. Boutros’s statement to the grand jurors earlier that day was understood as a reprimand that they were acting improperly by not returning the indictment sought in this case,” defense lawyers wrote.

Fallout spreads to D.C.

Another defense filing late Tuesday revealed that Department of Justice attorneys have agreed, at least in an email to the former defendants’ lawyers, to pay all attorneys’ fees demanded in a motion earlier this month.

But while it was “welcome” news for the now-cleared protesters, lawyers suggested that to a “cynical observer,” it might look like “the government’s agreement to pay Defendants’ legal fees was made largely to avoid having to produce the requested discovery (which appears to have struck a nerve) and a full accounting of its conduct.”

The suggestion pointed back to defense’s push for an independent special prosecutor from outside the Department of Justice.

“Obviously, no one can credibly investigate themselves,” defense lawyers wrote.

Separately on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to both the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Illinois Supreme Court’s Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission, which can suspend law licenses or disbar lawyers altogether.

In his letter, Raskin demanded both entities immediately open investigations into Boutros and his office.

“It is imperative that your offices investigate the blatant abuses of the grand jury process that Mr. Boutros has perpetrated,” Raskin wrote. “Mr. Boutros’s misconduct has done incalculable damage to public confidence in his office, in the Department of Justice (DOJ), and in the rule of law … Investigations into those violations are critical first steps to begin rebuilding the public confidence that Mr. Boutros has smashed up and destroyed.”

In response Wednesday, Boutros issued a statement calling the letter “incomplete, ill-informed, and severely distorted,” though he voiced support for both entities if they “look into the Broadview Six prosecution.”

“When they do so, we are confident that upon careful, unbiased consideration, neither entity will find misconduct by the United States Attorney because there was none,” he said.

Boutros is also facing calls to resign from Illinois congressional Democrats including from Durbin and Illinois’ junior U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, along with U.S. Reps. Mike Quigley, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and Jan Schakowsky.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.