US Attorney Andrew Boutros had a hell of a week. Last Thursday, the head of the Northern District of Illinois announced that he was dismissing all charges against the “Broadview 6,” professing himself to be deeply upset about gross misconduct before the grand jury. Never mind that during that same hearing, he admitted to having known about that misconduct since October and failed to mention it to the court. Then this Thursday Boutros put out a press release insisting that he is absolutely not investigating E. Jean Carroll, the woman sexually assaulted and then defamed by the president despite reports from every major news outlet in the country that he’s doing exactly that.
The implosion of the case against protesters outside the ICE facility in suburban Chicago has been well-documented. Boutros, a former federal prosecutor who previously led white collar prosecutions at Dechert, admitted that AUSA Sheri Mecklenburg: vouched and misstated the law in her first presentation to the grand jury; removed jurors in the second; and engaged in ex parte communications with jurors in the third. With hand on heart — we assume! — he assured Judge April Perry that no one in his office ever intended to bend the rules. He only proceeded with the tainted grand jury to avoid the appearance of forum shopping. Boutros did not explain why he let the prosecutor who got no billed on her first outing and behaved so inappropriately at her second take a third crack at the panel.
His office then launched a damage control campaign, loudly trumpeting an investigation into that one bad apple Mecklenburg’s prior cases.
But even as Boutros insisted that he’s a REAL lawyer, not a common Lindsey Halligan, it emerged that his office is leading a perjury investigation into the 82-year-old advice columnist who’s been trying to collect almost $90 million from the president for the past three years. The supposedly false statement took place in a deposition(!) in October of 2022.
Here’s the pertinent exchange:
Q: Are you presently paying your counsel’s fees?
A: This is a contingency case.
Q: So you’re not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date; is that correct?
A: I’m not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.
Q. Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?
A: No.
In fact, a non-profit associated with Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and prominent supporter of liberal causes, was paying some of the upfront case expenses, which Carroll’s counsel voluntarily disclosed in April of 2023. Trump’s lawyers made a big stink about it, which is kind of amazing considering that Alina Habba, Joe Tacopina, and Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in the Carroll cases, collected millions from the Trump campaign and associated PACs. Judge Lewis Kaplan gave them extra time to depose Carroll, and when they took their caterwauling to the Second Circuit, the judges said it was clear that Carroll simply forgot and then corrected the record when she remembered — no harm, no foul.
But now the Trump administration sees a chance to do to Hoffman’s non-profit, American Future Republic, what it did to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and take out Carroll, to boot. According to the New York Times and Washington Post, Boutros’s office is investigating whether AFR instructed/conspired with Carroll to lie about the source of her litigation funding, with an eye to potentially charging them all with money laundering and obstruction.
Yesterday, Boutros’s office put out a very carefully worded statement
Note that Boutros does not deny that his office is investigating AFR for conspiring with Carroll to commit perjury — just that she’s the target of the investigation. Which is pretty much what you’d expect from a guy who looked a federal judge in the eye last week and pinky swore that “there was no desire to mislead the Court and no deliberate misconduct on the part of the prosecutors.”
It’s possible that Andrew Boutros thinks he’ll come out the other side of this without too much stink on him. That he won’t be the next Aileen Cannon, or a Todd Blanche, or an Alina Habba. He certainly tried to assure Judge Perry that he wasn’t like those other hacks, he’s a real prosecutor who doesn’t play fast and loose. And yet here he is, barely a week later, making clear that the reek of corruption is coming from his office.
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
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