While federal prosecutors agreed to dismiss the felony charges against Oak Park Trustee Brian Straw and the other remaining “Broadview 6” defendants with prejudice, defense counsel is still petitioning for unredacted transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that made those serious charges possible.
The government decided last week that it will not pursue the felony conspiracy charge that it had indicted Straw and five other anti-ICE protestors on last October, with prosecutors formally dismissing the charge with prejudice in a court filing. With less than a month before the expected trial date, the defendants in the highly politicized case will now face only misdemeanor charges.
Prosecutors filed an indictment last October alleging that the six were among a crowd of protestors who blocked, pushed against and banged on a vehicle being driven by a federal agent into ICE’s Broadview Detention Facility the morning of Sept. 26. Until last Wednesday, the government had contended that that action amounted to a criminal conspiracy punishable by years in federal prison.
The four still charged are Straw, 45th ward Democratic committeeman Michael Rabbit, Katherine “Kat” Abughazaleh, who fell four points shy of winning Illinois’ 9th district congressional primary last month, and Andre Martin, who worked on Abughazaleh’s campaign staff.
The four are expected to be arraigned on new misdemeanor charges on Monday, May 18. The defense team has continued seeking unredacted transcripts of the grand jury proceedings that led to the group’s indictment last fall.
The defense made a push for those records in a Monday court filing.
“This remarkable about-face, abandoning a high-profile indictment rather than submit to scrutiny of its conduct before the grand jury comes at a time of mounting national distrust in the Department of Justice’s use of the grand jury process,” attorneys wrote. “The timing is likely no coincidence. In just the past few weeks, the government has secured indictments against a former FBI Director based on an Instagram photograph of seashells on a beach, and against a notable civil rights organization. These actions only underscore the growing concern that the grand jury is being wielded not as an instrument of justice, but as a tool of unchecked prosecutorial power meant to persecute any perceived enemies of the current White House.
U.S. Judge April Perry told attorney’s that she will rule on the matter sometime after the arraignment later this month, where she will hear additional argument about the transcripts, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
It was unclear when the felony charges were dropped if the trial would go forward as one joint trial for the defendants or as four individual trials, defense attorneys said last week. The trial date has been set for Tuesday, May 26.
The government’s move to drop the felonies came as a surprise to the defense, according to Straw’s attorney Chris Parente.
“This has been a failure since the beginning when this case was charged,” Parente told reporters. “It again demonstrates to us that this case should never have been brought. It was brought for the wrong reasons, they were never going to be able to prove it at trial and they’ve given up before we even get there. We’ll take the win for right now, but we’re very angry that they even tried to charge it because think about the people between the time that this case was indicted and today that did not go to a protest because they were worried that this office would charge them for just standing there.”
“We don’t know how many people stayed at home because they were worried about being indicted with a bullshit 372 charge by this U.S. Attorney’s Office, and now they’re going to dismiss it at this point.”
The government previously dropped the charges against Catherine “Cat” Sharp, a Chicago aldermanic staffer who gave up on her bid for the Cook County board citing the stress of the prosecution, and Joselyn Walsh, a local musician who was the only defendant in the case who doesn’t have a job in local progressive politics.
The so-called “Broadview 6” are among 32 known defendants to have been charged with nonimmigration crimes tied to Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago’s federal court.