Last week newly released grand jury transcripts disclosed a grand juror telling Broadview 6 prosecutor Sheri Mecklenburg last October that her case was “a crock of s**t.”
In the past 24 hours that crock has hit the proverbial fan, as lawyers recently acting as defense counsel are now fully on offense against the government, demanding sanctions, an investigation and full accountability for a litany of alleged misconduct.
Lawyers for the now exonerated Broadview 6 defendants, including Oak Park village trustee Brian Straw, filed two motions Tuesday, one seeking the appointment of a special counsel, and the other asking for an evidentiary hearing before Judge April Perry.
The motions were filed by attorneys for all six Broadview 6 defendants, including Christopher Parente and Damon Cheronis, the attorneys for Straw.
Around the same time as those court filings, a senior Congressional Democrat sent a letter to the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission calling for the commission and U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility to “immediately open an investigation into U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros.”
An evidentiary hearing in Judge Perry’s courtroom could lead to sanctions imposed by the judge; the special counsel could potentially bring criminal charges if cause is found.
The government has already waved a legal white flag of sorts, stating it would “not contest that defendants are entitled to their legal fees.” The defense suggested that that was more a matter of desperation than principle, saying the offer 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.”
Parente and his legal colleagues are casting a wide net intended to determine just who played a role in the decision last October to indict and prosecute the case, and who was responsible for the alleged cover up of grand jury misconduct by prosecutors.
“There is no doubt the Court can – and should – conduct an evidentiary hearing on sanctions for the prosecutorial misconduct in this case, both the misconduct that is already manifest, and additional misconduct which we anticipate is yet uncovered,” the motion argued.
Parente and others also argued that without a deep dive by an outside special counsel, the DOJ could conveniently scapegoat Mecklenburg, who has already acknowledged in transcripts that she engaged in inappropriate conversations with two grand jury members and is shown engaging in other questionable behavior.
They contend there are numerous DOJ officials responsible for the misconduct, including Boutros and his superiors in Washington D.C.
The hearing would seek to “discern the full factual record and inform any potential sanctions for that misconduct,” Parente said. “Indeed, these steps must be taken in large part because of what appears to be a determined effort to blame a single prosecutor when the misconduct now known … runs much deeper and indeed to the highest levels of the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office and likely to the Department of Justice in Washington D.C.”
On Tuesday U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, (D-Maryland), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, continued the theme voiced by both the Broadview Six defense team and the judge, that long-held judicial standards had been violated and an essential trust broken.
In a blistering three-page letter, Raskin bluntly accused Boutros of “egregious misconduct” that was, he said, “compounded by an apparent cover-up.”
Citing the recently released grand jury transcripts, Raskin said Boutros’s “outrageous conduct warrants a complete and thorough investigation,” saying he “has done incalculable damage to public confidence in his office, in the Department of Justice (DOJ), and in the rule of law.”
Raskin accused Boutros of “tampering” with the grand jury, saying he and his team “corrupted and contaminated the deliberative process, hollowed out the protection that the Constitution guarantees and violated the would-be defendants’ right to due process.”
“Mr. Boutros personally appeared before a panel and invited any grand juror ‘struggling’ with ‘the immigration cases’ to ‘raise your hand and identify yourself, because we have a different procedure for that’ besides serving on the grand jury,” Raskin wrote. “Hours later, on its third try, the government finally secured its indictment.”
“None of this is how justice is supposed to work in America,” Raskin wrote. “Enshrined in our Constitution, grand juries are supposed to stand as a neutral arbiter between the state and the accused, carefully weighing the evidence and rejecting flimsy or unjust charges on behalf of the people.”
In their motion for an evidentiary hearing, the defense team cited Judge Perry’s own words on May 21, regarding her trust in the government’s words and motives having “been broken.”
“We all took the government attorneys’ word on a great many things,” Perry said. “I, at the time, was operating on a presumption of regular grand jury proceedings, which these clearly were not.”
“To be sure, the presumption of regularity no longer holds,” Parente said in the June 16 motion, “at least not at this time, in this district. Full facts and transparency are demanded by the conduct at issue, conduct which irreparably harmed the defendants’ rights, lives and livelihoods, thoroughly undermined the grand jury function, and significantly damaged the public’s trust in our criminal justice system.”