Kat Abughazaleh was one of six defendents in a clearly bullshit case brought by the Trump Administration because they had the temerity to protest the clearly illegal ICE actions in the Chicago area. I’m sure you’ve all read how that goes — all of the charges against her and the other five were dropped, with prejudice:
CHICAGO — In a dramatic final twist to the highest-profile criminal case resulting from “Operation Midway Blitz,” the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday dropped all charges against the remaining “Broadview Six” protesters, citing apparent prosecutorial misconduct in the grand jury proceedings that led to last fall’s indictments.
The case had been scheduled to go to a rare federal misdemeanor trial next week after having been winnowed down from six to four defendants in March before prosecutors suddenly announced their decision to drop the marquee felony conspiracy charge late last month.
But in a stunning turn of events Thursday, a federal judge canceled the trial after a closed-door hearing in which she rebuked prosecutors for both their dealings with the grand jury and for having previously obscured parts of the grand jury transcript that would have revealed their apparent misconduct earlier.
U.S. District Judge April Perry told assistant U.S. attorneys on the case that she was “incredibly shocked” by the redactions in an earlier version of the grand jury transcript compared with the full unredacted version she read earlier this week.
“I have read hundreds — if not thousands — of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury,” Perry said, according to a record of the sealed hearing made public Thursday evening. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
In a public hearing convened Thursday afternoon, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, the Trump administration’s highest-ranking official in Chicago, took the extraordinary step of showing up in person to Perry’s courtroom in order to take responsibility for his office’s actions and ask that the remaining charges be dropped.
From what I’ve read, there was a lot of prosecutorial misconduct in the case. This included lying to a grand jury, and when the jury wouldn’t send down an indictment twice, the prosecutors removed the jurors who voted against the indictment previously in order to get an indictment the third time. Then, they lied to the judge about it, and redacted part of the grand jury proceedings.
The apparently senile senior Senator from Illinois, Dick “I should have retired years ago” Durbin was stupid enough to let the lead prosecutor from the case join his Judiciary Committee staff. She was finally dismissed yesterday. In fairness, she left her post as a 20-year federal prosecutor in February so she wasn’t responsible for all the misconduct, just most of it.
I listen to the Serious Trouble podcast, which is Ken White/Popehat (yay!) and Josh Barro (boo!). Ken posted a thread on this on BlueSky about how pissed off the judge was. On that podcast, White often talks about how the incompetence of the Trump DoJ has caused federal judges to suspend the “presumption of regularity” which, as a non-lawyer, basically means that presumption that the DoJ is telling the truth. Good. If a 20-year federal Chicago prosecutor could have so easily lied to a grand jury and perverted the course of justice, then the rot must go pretty fucking deep at the DoJ.
Older Democrats like Durbin have a deep, abiding “presumption of regularity” about the the government bureaucracy in general. Part of the reason we need to get rid of him and others who don’t get it is because we’re going to have a long, ugly cleanup of the federal government. He won’t help. Maybe his replacement Juliana Stratton will.
