Broadview 6 judge April Perry formally responded Monday afternoon to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Oct 30 filing in which it declined to provide evidence she had requested in her inquiry into alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
One need not possess a law degree to understand the judge was not happy.
In her 7-page order Perry concluded that there is “more than an adequate factual basis for the court to pursue an inquiry as to whether willful false statements were made to the court.”
Those statements relate to the Sept. 2025 grand jury process that led to the indictment of Oak Park Village Trustee Brian Straw and five others for their actions at a protest at the Broadview ICE detention facility.
Setting aside the numerous legal references Perry made in her order, there is a strong sense that she has had quite enough. The judge said she had believed that the DOJ “would, in fact, comply voluntarily” following an hour-long hearing Oct. 1. That hearing she noted, was “for the very purpose of discerning whether the government had any objection to voluntary compliance.”
The government, she said, “provided no reason that it would not comply.”
“Moreover,” Perry said, “voluntary compliance seemed to be the government’s preferred path, given the government’s strong objections to a third-party with subpoena power being appointed to investigate this matter.”
Perry ordered that Andrew Boutros, U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, and three assistant U.S. Attorneys “must appear to testify under oath” before her on Nov. 16.
Apparently sensitive to the possibility some might attempt to engage in parsing phrases or quibbling with her wording, Perry added a clarifying footnote stating that “The court uses ‘must’ in its legal sense, which is to say it is mandatory.”
Perry said the scope of the testimony on Nov. 16 “will include the grand jury transcripts at issue in this case and the redactions to those transcripts, the accuracy of statements made to the court regarding communications with those outside of the USAO about this case, USA Boutros’s statements to the court on May 21 (2026), and prosecutors’ repeated failures to correct the court’s stated misconceptions about the aforementioned matters.”
Perry said she will also accept testimony from any former or current employee of the U.S. Attorney’s Office or federal law enforcement agency who has first-hand knowledge about the above events and who wants to ensure a full and accurate record is presented to the court.”
Perry, who has previously told prosecutors that the trust she normally invests in them “has been broken,” said she took them at their word at the Oct. 1 hearing that they were “interested in regaining the court’s trust after (their) acknowledged missteps.”
“Trust is best rebuilt through cooperation, not gamesmanship,” Perry concluded.
