Crime & Law

‘Broadview Six’ Seek Preservation Order After Allegations of ‘Nauseating’ Misconduct By Federal Prosecutors Tank Case

Attorneys for the former “Broadview Six” defendants are asking a judge to preserve all records and communications from the government’s grand jury proceedings in the controversial case, arguing they’ve “lost complete faith and confidence” in federal prosecutors to “do the right thing” on their own.

Friday’s motion comes a day after prosecutors dismissed all charges, with prejudice, against the remaining four defendants, a stunning turn following allegations of blatant prosecutorial misconduct and a subsequent cover-up by members of Chicago’s U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Chris Parente, an attorney who represented Oak Park Village Board Trustee Brian Straw, said after reading transcripts from the secret grand jury proceedings, he has “no doubt that severe sanctions will be forthcoming.”

He and his fellow defense attorneys are now asking U.S. District Judge April Perry to order the preservation of “all material information related to this scandal” ahead of what he expects will be upcoming sanctions hearings.

“In the meantime,” Parente wrote in a three-page motion Friday, “given the level of misconduct at issue and the brazenness of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for not immediately disclosing this level of misconduct to the Court or defense counsel, defense counsel has lost complete faith and confidence in this U.S. Attorney’s Office to do the right thing on its own.”

Perry scheduled a hearing Tuesday to hear that motion.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros appeared before Perry on Thursday afternoon to apologize for his prosecutors’ behavior and announce his office would be dismissing all charges against Straw, former 9th District congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, her campaign staffer Andre Martin and Democratic Committeeperson Michael Rabbitt.

Prosecutors previously dropped all charges against two others, Catherine Sharp and Joselyn Walsh, before later dismissing the top conspiracy count against the remaining four defendants, who were set to go to trial next week on misdemeanor impeding charges.

Instead, Boutros’ office now faces widespread criticism for its handling of the high-profile case behind closed doors.

Perry previously reviewed redacted versions of transcripts from the grand jury proceedings, but after defense attorneys pushed her to look over the fully unredacted versions of those records, the judge immediately demanded prosecutors explain what happened in a closed-door hearing Thursday.

A transcript of that hearing released late Thursday revealed the breadth of the allegations against the government. After an initial grand jury refused to indict the six, prosecutors allegedly removed some members who disagreed with their theory of the case and presented it again to a second grand jury.

Perry found prosecutors had improper “ex parte” communication with grand jury members outside the confines of the hearing, and engaged in “vouching,” in which they assured grand jury members the case would not have been presented unless the allegations against the defendants were true.

“The degree of misconduct that occurred in the Grand Jury in this case is nauseating,” Parente, a former federal prosecutor himself, wrote in Friday's motion.

Perry on Thursday said she was “incredibly shocked” by the government’s redactions. She said she’s read “hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts” and never seen the “types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

“I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing,” she said, according to the transcript. “That trust has been broken.”

“Mistakes happen,” Perry added. “They happen to all of us. But as I tell my children, you own it. You admit to it. You apologize for it, and you move on. What you do not do is hide it.”

Defense attorneys previously questioned whether the charges were politically driven by the Trump administration, though prosecutors said they received no such push to pursue the case from Washington.

But after reading the grand jury transcripts, Perry said the defense may be entitled to a hearing over whether the government engaged in a “vindictive prosecution” of their clients.

She also said the potential exists for sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct and for potential ethical violations.

The politically charged case stemmed from a confrontation just before 8 a.m. Sept. 26 between protesters and federal agents outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s processing facility in west suburban Broadview. 

Prosecutors alleged a group of protesters that allegedly included the defendants surrounded a government vehicle, “with the intent to hinder and impede” a federal agent from proceeding to the Broadview facility and “discharging the duties of his office.”

In a video posted to her social media accounts that day, Abughazaleh and more than a dozen other protesters can be seen trying to physically prevent an SUV from entering the facility by pushing back on the car.

In apologizing to Perry, Boutros claimed he was unaware of any of this conduct until late last month when prosecutors voluntarily dropped the felony conspiracy count against the remaining four defendants.

That move came just as prosecutors were ordered to present the unredacted grand jury transcripts to court, raising a red flag in the eyes of defense attorneys who continued pushing to unseal those documents.

Boutros on Thursday also told Perry he still stood by the misdemeanor charges the remaining defendants were set to go to trial on next week, claiming their conduct outside the ICE facility is “unacceptable in a civilized society” and that it was but “for the grace of God” that no one was injured during the alleged encounter.

Perry appeared frustrated with that statement, telling Boutros he was “significantly undercutting your mea culpa here by standing behind the charges and continuing to vilify these particular defendants.”

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