Judge April Perry orders Boutros and three assistants to testify
Douglas DePodesta, a 24-year FBI veteran who formerly headed the FBI’s Chicago field office, sued senior Justice Department officials on Monday. He says he lost his job after being wrongly blamed for prosecutions that fell apart against six people who protested Operation Midway Blitz. The suit says federal prosecutors pushed “politically motivated prosecutions” against Chicago demonstrators before gathering evidence.
Hours after the filing, U.S. District Judge April Perry ordered Andrew Boutros, the top federal prosecutor in Illinois, and three assistant attorneys to testify under oath on Nov. 16 in the Broadview Six case. “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,” Perry wrote.
DePodesta accused Boutros of starting a “campaign within the Department of Justice to blame” him after the case fell apart earlier this year. DePodesta says his superiors told him that FBI Director Kash Patel wanted him fired, and that he stepped down against his will this summer. “I saw the writing on the wall,” he said. Boutros’s office declined to comment, while the FBI and Justice Department, both named in the suit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During Operation Midway Blitz, the Chicago immigration enforcement operation, federal prosecutors brought charges against around 30 protesters, and many of those charges have been dropped or dismissed. Boutros’s office last October charged six people with conspiring to obstruct a federal officer, a felony, for their actions during a protest at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview.
Transcripts turned over to the court after a judge ordered Boutros’s office to remove redactions revealed that a grand jury twice refused to indict the six, despite prosecutors’ urgings and a speech Boutros gave to jurors. Boutros dropped all charges against the six in May as the court moved to investigate possible prosecutorial misconduct.
The suit says Boutros often pressured attorneys under him in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois to press charges “before investigating the objective evidence.” It alleges that he wanted felony charges when the assistants “favored misdemeanors or no charges at all.”
According to the complaint, Boutros faced pressure from the Justice Department throughout Operation Midway Blitz to charge protesters with felonies. DePodesta’s attorneys wrote that Boutros sent DePodesta emails demanding that he open FBI investigations into individuals with political views or affiliations in opposition to the Trump administration.
DePodesta’s attorneys wrote that Boutros “repeatedly complained to his superiors in Washington” that the failure was DePodesta’s fault “to deflect attention from his own malfeasance.” DePodesta denied the accusations to his FBI superiors. The suit says they conceded that he was only being forced out because of the “political pressure Boutros created.”
The suit also alleges that Boutros told Justice Department leadership that DePodesta and his sister-in-law, attorney Nancy DePodesta, “conspired to destroy” the case. Nancy DePodesta represents Michael Rabbitt, one of the former defendants, and confirmed to The Associated Press that she is Douglas DePodesta’s sister-in-law. She defended her brother-in-law, saying, “There is no one at the FBI who took their oath of office and their ethical and moral responsibilities more seriously than Doug.” She said, “It is both heartbreaking and shameful that he was forced out of his position based on what appear to be utterly false rumors spread by” Boutros.
In late September, one prosecutor on the Broadview Six case abruptly resigned and wrote in her resignation letter that Boutros had “scapegoated and publicly vilified” her. She filed a motion asking the court to treat her as an independent party going forward.
The former defendants have asked Perry to appoint a special counsel to look into possible misconduct by prosecutors. At an Oct. 1 hearing, Perry ordered further “fact-finding” about communications between Boutros’s office and Justice Department leadership.