Another day, another wild story about corruption at the US Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Illinois. The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush reports that prosecutors at the formerly august institution spent the past year harassing the family of a state judge in New York.
By sheer coincidence, Justice Juan Merchan presided over the false business records case in which Trump was found guilty of covering up the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen fronted the adult film star $130,000, and she agreed never to speak about her experience watching Shark Week with Trump, spanking him with a magazine bearing his own image, and their brief, unsatisfying sexual encounter in 2006.
The case was a freakish parade of unethical lawyering. As Rudy Giuliani confirmed on national television in 2018, Trump made a series of payments to Cohen which were denominated as legal fees, but were in fact reimbursements for the money paid to Daniels.
“When I heard of Cohen’s retainer for $130,000, he was doing no work for the president. I said, ‘Well, that’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes for Michael,’” Giuliani babbled to a horrified Sean Hannity.
In 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump, and the next year a jury convicted him on all 34 counts. Along the way, Trump’s then-lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, made multiple flagrantly disingenuous claims of prosecutorial misconduct.
“You are literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and to make me complicit in it, and you don’t have a single cite to support that position,” Justice Merchan scolded them.
Like so many of Trump’s adversaries, the judge endured wave after wave of harassment by Trump and his supporters. His daughter, Loren Merchan, worked for Authentic Campaigns, a Democratic communications firm, and Trump brayed that this amounted to a disqualifying conflict. Justice Merchan sought and received a clean bill of health from the state’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which agreed that there was “nothing in the inquiry to suggest that the outcome of the case could have any effect on the judge’s relative, the relative’s business, or any of their interests.”
Citing this, he denied several histrionic motions for recusal spearheaded by Blanche, who aggressively defended his client’s supposed First Amendment right to summon trollstorms on the judge and his family.
Trump is still appealing that conviction, but in the meantime his allies in Congress took up the harassment campaign. In August of 2024, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan demanded that Authentic Campaigns hand over a massive amount of correspondence with its Democratic clients, as well as Loren Merchan’s emails with her own father. The firm rebuffed Jordan’s bullying, but a year later Andrew Boutros, the US Attorney in Chicago, grabbed the baton.
Per the Times, Boutros’s office issued a grand jury subpoena demanding that the firm hand over communications with “former Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and the Democratic National Committee.” Later they expanded their demands even further:
In addition to initially requesting information from the Harris and Biden presidential campaigns, Mr. Boutros sought material from Ms. Merchan, Mr. Bragg and one of his deputies, Matthew Colangelo; Mr. Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House; Ms. Hochul; Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California; Representative Daniel Goldman, Democrat of New York; Representative Lauren Underwood, Democrat of Illinois; and the Democratic Party’s House and Senate fund-raising arms as well as the Democratic National Committee.
Authentic Campaigns, which Ms. Merchan left in 2024, is headquartered in Chicago, but it’s not clear what crime the US Attorney in Chicago could be investigating with respect to a three-year-old indictment in Manhattan. The company hired Preet Bharara, the former US Attorney for SDNY, who managed to get the subpoena narrowed to “focus on a $468 payment from Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, and emails between Ms. Merchan and her father.”
This isn’t the first time that Boutros’s office has gone after one of Trump’s political foes. In May, CNN reported that his team was investigating E. Jean Carroll, whom Trump sexually assaulted and defamed. The “crime” involved deposition testimony in 2022 during which Carroll said that she didn’t know if anyone was funding her litigation. In fact, as her lawyers later disclosed, a non-profit supported by billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of her fees and expenses. That non-profit is located in Chicago, and Boutros seized on this connection as a hook to harass Trump’s victim.
Of course, Boutros’s most famous debacle involved the Broadview 6 protesters he charged for conspiring to obstruct an ICE agent … by letting him drive his car into their bodies. That case imploded when the grand jury transcripts were finally unsealed, revealing multiple instances of gross prosecutorial misconduct — but only after months of the US Attorney’s Office snorting indignantly that their conduct is always above reproach.
“Such assumptions are the product of fevered paranoia and delusional speculation, not to mention grossly disingenuous and thoroughly irresponsible,” Assistant US Attorney William Hogan complained.
Boutros hopes to offload culpability for this disaster onto Sherri Mecklenburg, a 20-year veteran of the office who presented the Broadview 6 case to the grand jury. He’s currently seeking to fend off further inquiry by offering to pay the defendants’ legal fees and threatening to mandamus Judge April Perry if she asks too many questions. But the Times reports that AUSAs Matthew Skiba and the aforementioned William Hogan, both of whom worked on the Broadview 6 case, were also involved in the subpoenas for Loren Merchan and her former employer.
At a hearing before Judge Perry after she finally examined the full grand jury transcripts in the Broadview 6 case, Skiba whined that he’d only been a prosecutor for a few weeks when he appeared before the grand jury. Hogan, a 40-year veteran of the office, admitted that he was responsible for the strategic redactions which hid the worst of the misconduct from the court, while allowing the judge to think that it was merely a clerical error by the transcriptionist.
The new revelation suggests that they were Boutros’s go-to crew for politically dirty prosecutions and weaponized investigations — like Nixon’s plumbers but dumber. Now it’s all coming out, and Boutros, who enjoyed a sterling reputation as a white collar defense attorney before joining the Trump administration, will never get this shit off his shoes. Sooner or later — and likely sooner if Democrats take back either House of Congress — he will certainly find that subpoena cannon turned on himself.
Karma’s a bitch, counselor.
Prosecutors Examined Firm With Tie to Judge in Trump Hush Money Trial [NYT]
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
The post The Temptation And Corruption Of Andrew Boutros appeared first on Above the Law.
Another day, another wild story about corruption at the US Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Illinois. The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush reports that prosecutors at the formerly august institution spent the past year harassing the family of a state judge in New York.
By sheer coincidence, Justice Juan Merchan presided over the false business records case in which Trump was found guilty of covering up the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen fronted the adult film star $130,000, and she agreed never to speak about her experience watching Shark Week with Trump, spanking him with a magazine bearing his own image, and their brief, unsatisfying sexual encounter in 2006.
The case was a freakish parade of unethical lawyering. As Rudy Giuliani confirmed on national television in 2018, Trump made a series of payments to Cohen which were denominated as legal fees, but were in fact reimbursements for the money paid to Daniels.
“When I heard of Cohen’s retainer for $130,000, he was doing no work for the president. I said, ‘Well, that’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes for Michael,’” Giuliani babbled to a horrified Sean Hannity.
In 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump, and the next year a jury convicted him on all 34 counts. Along the way, Trump’s then-lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, made multiple flagrantly disingenuous claims of prosecutorial misconduct.
“You are literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and to make me complicit in it, and you don’t have a single cite to support that position,” Justice Merchan scolded them.
Like so many of Trump’s adversaries, the judge endured wave after wave of harassment by Trump and his supporters. His daughter, Loren Merchan, worked for Authentic Campaigns, a Democratic communications firm, and Trump brayed that this amounted to a disqualifying conflict. Justice Merchan sought and received a clean bill of health from the state’s Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics, which agreed that there was “nothing in the inquiry to suggest that the outcome of the case could have any effect on the judge’s relative, the relative’s business, or any of their interests.”
Citing this, he denied several histrionic motions for recusal spearheaded by Blanche, who aggressively defended his client’s supposed First Amendment right to summon trollstorms on the judge and his family.
Trump is still appealing that conviction, but in the meantime his allies in Congress took up the harassment campaign. In August of 2024, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan demanded that Authentic Campaigns hand over a massive amount of correspondence with its Democratic clients, as well as Loren Merchan’s emails with her own father. The firm rebuffed Jordan’s bullying, but a year later Andrew Boutros, the US Attorney in Chicago, grabbed the baton.
Per the Times, Boutros’s office issued a grand jury subpoena demanding that the firm hand over communications with “former Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and the Democratic National Committee.” Later they expanded their demands even further:
In addition to initially requesting information from the Harris and Biden presidential campaigns, Mr. Boutros sought material from Ms. Merchan, Mr. Bragg and one of his deputies, Matthew Colangelo; Mr. Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House; Ms. Hochul; Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California; Representative Daniel Goldman, Democrat of New York; Representative Lauren Underwood, Democrat of Illinois; and the Democratic Party’s House and Senate fund-raising arms as well as the Democratic National Committee.
Authentic Campaigns, which Ms. Merchan left in 2024, is headquartered in Chicago, but it’s not clear what crime the US Attorney in Chicago could be investigating with respect to a three-year-old indictment in Manhattan. The company hired Preet Bharara, the former US Attorney for SDNY, who managed to get the subpoena narrowed to “focus on a $468 payment from Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, and emails between Ms. Merchan and her father.”
This isn’t the first time that Boutros’s office has gone after one of Trump’s political foes. In May, CNN reported that his team was investigating E. Jean Carroll, whom Trump sexually assaulted and defamed. The “crime” involved deposition testimony in 2022 during which Carroll said that she didn’t know if anyone was funding her litigation. In fact, as her lawyers later disclosed, a non-profit supported by billionaire Reid Hoffman had paid some of her fees and expenses. That non-profit is located in Chicago, and Boutros seized on this connection as a hook to harass Trump’s victim.
Of course, Boutros’s most famous debacle involved the Broadview 6 protesters he charged for conspiring to obstruct an ICE agent … by letting him drive his car into their bodies. That case imploded when the grand jury transcripts were finally unsealed, revealing multiple instances of gross prosecutorial misconduct — but only after months of the US Attorney’s Office snorting indignantly that their conduct is always above reproach.
“Such assumptions are the product of fevered paranoia and delusional speculation, not to mention grossly disingenuous and thoroughly irresponsible,” Assistant US Attorney William Hogan complained.
Boutros hopes to offload culpability for this disaster onto Sherri Mecklenburg, a 20-year veteran of the office who presented the Broadview 6 case to the grand jury. He’s currently seeking to fend off further inquiry by offering to pay the defendants’ legal fees and threatening to mandamus Judge April Perry if she asks too many questions. But the Times reports that AUSAs Matthew Skiba and the aforementioned William Hogan, both of whom worked on the Broadview 6 case, were also involved in the subpoenas for Loren Merchan and her former employer.
At a hearing before Judge Perry after she finally examined the full grand jury transcripts in the Broadview 6 case, Skiba whined that he’d only been a prosecutor for a few weeks when he appeared before the grand jury. Hogan, a 40-year veteran of the office, admitted that he was responsible for the strategic redactions which hid the worst of the misconduct from the court, while allowing the judge to think that it was merely a clerical error by the transcriptionist.
The new revelation suggests that they were Boutros’s go-to crew for politically dirty prosecutions and weaponized investigations — like Nixon’s plumbers but dumber. Now it’s all coming out, and Boutros, who enjoyed a sterling reputation as a white collar defense attorney before joining the Trump administration, will never get this shit off his shoes. Sooner or later — and likely sooner if Democrats take back either House of Congress — he will certainly find that subpoena cannon turned on himself.
Karma’s a bitch, counselor.
[NYT]
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
