Prosecutor Cut From Senate Judiciary Over Alleged Misconduct (1)

A longtime federal prosecutor’s detail to the Senate Judiciary Committee has been terminated after allegations she was involved in serious misconduct at grand jury proceedings last year, according to a spokesperson for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

Sheri Mecklenburg was detailed to the committee in February. Before that, she had been leading the prosecution of several anti-ICE protesters in the Northern District of Illinois. That case was dismissed on the cusp of trial Thursday after explosive allegations that prosecutors, including Mecklenburg, acted improperly at the grand jury.

According to the statement from a Durbin spokesperson, the Senate Judiciary Committee didn’t directly employ Mecklenburg, but “because of the gravity of the charges in this case” her detail was terminated. The statement said Durbin’s office had no knowledge of the allegations until they became public Thursday and called the prosecution “deeply flawed.”

Attempts to reach Mecklenburg for comment Friday were unsuccessful. A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office in Chicago didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case against the protesters was brought to the grand jury in the fall, during the thick of the Trump administration’s aggressive Chicago-area deportation campaign known as “Operation Midway Blitz.” They were accused of blocking a federal agent from driving toward an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the Chicago suburbs.

Six people were initially charged with felony conspiracy and misdemeanor charges of impeding a federal officer. Charges against two of them were dropped altogether in March, and prosecutors later dismissed the conspiracy charge against the four remaining defendants.

US Attorney Andrew Boutros said in court Thursday he decided prosecutors should drop the felony in late April, shortly after he learned about certain improprieties at the grand jury, including “vouching,” in which a prosecutor assures grand jurors about the strength of the case.

Boutros himself dismissed the remaining misdemeanor charges Thursday. Trial had been scheduled to begin next week.

Mecklenburg wasn’t in court Thursday, but her name was mentioned by an Assistant US attorney who was working on the case at the grand jury, according to an unsealed transcript of closed portions of the hearing.

Assistant US Attorney Matthew Skiba acknowledged that Mecklenburg was “not here to defend herself,” then said he was at the grand jury with a “senior veteran.”

Skiba said he wasn’t trying to “deflect blame” but he’d only joined the office in July and the protester case was just his second time before a grand jury.

“I remember what you referred to as the vouching incident,” he told Judge April Perry. “I remember thinking at the time that I would never make that statement as a matter of personal style. What I did not know then, and what only became apparent as we were discussing dismissing these charges, is that’s beyond personal style, and that is, at a minimum, arguably misconduct.”

Perry, herself a former federal prosecutor, had inspected unredacted versions of grand jury transcripts for the first time earlier this week after persistent requests from defense attorneys, who suspected flaws at the proceedings that could provide grounds to throw out the case.

“I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several US Attorneys who appeared before the grand jury,” Perry said, according to the hearing transcript. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”

Perry indicated that sanctions could be appropriate. She scheduled a June 2 hearing to discuss “ancillary issues.”