The US attorney’s office in Chicago is in a five-alarm fire after problems with recent grand jury presentations resulted three dropped criminal cases.
The recently discovered problems have prompted Andrew Boutros, the Trump-appointed and judge-endorsed US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to do his own review of more than 100 transcripts of confidential grand jury sessions, putting a close eye on cases that have been charged in the last year.
Boutros said he decided to drop the criminal cases — which alleged covid fraud, years old arson, and a politically-charged cases against ICE protestors — because of one lower-level prosecutor’s work on them.
Boutros said in a court filing on Monday that he planned to review nearly 20 years of cases the prosecutor worked on before grand juries, checking whether there had been other unfair grand jury presentations. Prosecutors present evidence to grand juries in secret proceedings before the grand jurors decide whether to indict.
Boutros’ US attorney’s office may review other prosecutors’ work, he said in the court filing, if the office finds others “having a high error rate of irregularities in the grand jury.”
