Chicago US attorney’s office drops three cases amid turmoil over improper grand jury presentations

(CNN) — The US attorney’s office in Chicago is in a five-alarm fire after problems with recent grand jury presentations resulted in 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.”

The effort is aimed at shoring up trust that the Justice Department has lost with federal judges in the Northern District of Illinois, Boutros also said.

Yet Boutros and the Justice Department are still potentially facing months of internal and external reviews, including from judges in Chicago — all while the department’s political leadership is being closely watched in courts across the country and by lawmakers on Capitol Hill. At the same time, the US attorney’s office and other Justice Department outposts have struggled to appease the White House as it seeks more charged criminal cases and aggressive law enforcement, including cases being brought against political foes of the president.

Dismissal this week

The most recent case the US attorney’s office dropped was against four defendants who had been investigated for years until finally facing charges last year for a supermarket fire in 2018. Prosecutors accused the group of arson.

One prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg, allegedly made improper statements to the grand jury about the defendants and about proving the case in July last year, according to the court record. A recording captured her speaking to a grand juror about the case without a court reporter present in the grand jury room, Boutros also said.

The grand jury approved the indictment in September 2025.

“The U.S. Attorney and the U.S. Attorney’s Office do not condone those irregularities in the grand jury presentations, which should not have happened under any circumstances,” Boutros wrote to a federal judge in the arson case.

An attorney now representing Mecklenburg declined to comment, and judges and Justice Department authorities haven’t yet fully determined the missteps.

But Mecklenburg also made problematic comments to another grand jury, in the more high-profile Broadview Six case against Democratic activists last year, the US attorney’s office and the Chicago federal district court have said.

In that case, the Justice Department sought to bring a case against six democratic politicians and activists who protested outside a federal immigration detention center near Chicago. A grand jury eventually indicted the defendants in the fall, but in recent weeks a judge dismissed the case after finding significant problems in what Mecklenburg said to the grand jury.

“What initially appeared to be an aberration tied to high-profile cases appears to have been a recurring practice that infects even garden-variety federal prosecutions,” defense lawyers in the arson case wrote to the judge last week.

Judge Robert Gettleman dismissed the arson case on Monday and barred the Justice Department from attempting to charge it again in the future.

Mecklenburg exited her Chicago cases in February but she is still employed by the Justice Department. She had worked on hundreds of cases over about 20 years in the office.

The other case the Chicago US attorney’s office has dismissed was one Mecklenburg had worked on for years, alleging fraud during the covid pandemic at a hospital.

A challenge for leadership

The situation still hangs over Boutros’ tenure, especially at a time where the Trump administration has been aggressive with its enforcement of anti-immigration policies in Chicago, and Todd Blanche, who has publicly backed Boutros from Washington, awaits his confirmation hearings to become Attorney General.

Defense attorneys in the case against a group of Democratic activists told a judge last week the office may be trying to pin all blame on Mecklenburg.

They accused others in the US attorney’s office tried to cover up the misconduct before the grand jury in recent weeks, by heavily redacting grand jury transcripts when the court first read them. And the defense lawyers are still suggesting interactions between the Chicago office and Blanche’s team may have prompted the case being charged in the first place, which accused the group that was protesting a federal immigration detention facility of hampering authorities.

The defense team has asked federal Judge April Perry, of the Northern District of Illinois’ trial-level court, to appoint an outside investigator to examine the Justice Department’s work on the case.

“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 — particularly in this case — 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.,” the attorneys for the Broadview Six said. “To not appoint a special prosecutor here would enable the government’s strategy to lay all that has happened on a single scapegoat, a convenient outcome for those who are eager to turn the page.”

Perry hasn’t decided on further proceedings since she dismissed all Broadview Six charges last month. It is unclear the power she may have to look further at the Justice Department’s actions, now that the case is dismissed. Other judges in recent months who have wanted to dig into Justice Department internal handling of cases have faced resistance from the Trump administration.

Amid the fallout this month, a large group of prominent alumni from the Chicago US attorney’s office signed onto a letter condemning Boutros’ approach and the infiltration of politics into prosecutors’ decision-making since spring 2025.

The group said they were especially concerned with grand jury irregularities; Chicago federal prosecutors attempting to charge cases that ended in the cases being rejected in court; and an exodus of talented attorneys from the office.

“Actions taken by leadership in the last year have tarnished the reputation of the United Statements Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, where each of us once served as an AUSA,” the group of more than 100 lawyers wrote. “These matters raise questions about whether there is a failure of leadership in the office we deeply respect and whether once-forbidden political considerations are infecting prosecutorial decisions. The answer to both questions, in our view, is yes.”

Boutros responded publicly by touting an increase in indictments his office has brought this year. He said in a social media post that when he took the job last April, he “found an office that was not well.”

“Having conducted an unprecedented root-cause analysis of nearly every facet of the Office, we’ve spent the last year righting the ship,” Boutros added. “We’ve unleashed energy and talent that once was suppressed, stifled, and stymied.”

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