CHICAGO —Hours before the release of stunning grand jury transcripts in the “Broadview Six” case Tuesday, the fallout from the now-dismissed prosecutorial debacle was front-and-center in a hearing on an unrelated fraud case that everyone thought was over.

Instead, lawyers for Yale Schiff, who pleaded guilty to bank fraud and is serving a three-year prison sentence, were demanding that U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland take a look at the transcripts of the long-ago grand jury sessions behind Schiff’s indictment, which were handled by the same prosecutor who led the Broadview Six investigation.

Read the transcript: ‘Broadview Six’ grand jury transcripts released showing alleged misconduct by prosecutors

After the Broadview Six charges were abruptly dismissed last month, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros promised his office was conducting a thorough review of every case that veteran prosecutor Sheri Mecklenburg had handled, and would proactively reach out to defense attorneys to provide normally secret grand jury “minutes” to assess if any wrongdoing had occurred.

On Tuesday, however, the U.S. attorney’s office was objecting to doing that in Schiff’s case — at least immediately.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur told Rowland during a telephone hearing that since Schiff had pleaded guilty, he may have waived any collateral attack on his conviction, making the production of any grand jury materials moot. She asked for time to look into the legal issues and file a brief.

Rowland said ordinarily that may be a very strong argument. But times have changed at the U.S. attorney’s office.

“The front office has created, as you know, a credibility crisis, and that is a real problem,” Rowland told MacArthur. The judge ordered MacArthur to turn over the transcripts to her next week so she could review them privately and see if there were any issues.

After court, Schiff’s attorney, Christopher Parente, blasted the U.S. attorney’s office for taking a position seemingly “at odds” with Boutros’s own public statements about transparency.

“The prosecutor acknowledged that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had not even bothered to order the transcripts despite requests from myself for the past two weeks,” said Parente, who also represents one of the former Broadview Six defendants.

The development in Schiff’s case was yet another signal that the scandal ignited by the Broadview Six case against Operation Midway Blitz protesters may only be getting started.

The transcripts revealed that after a grand jury had refused to indict the protesters on conspiracy charges, prosecutors returned a week later to try again, but ran into even more skepticism. One grand juror went so far as to call the case a “crock of (expletive),” while at least one other was dismissed by Mecklenburg after refusing to participate in a vote.

Mecklenburg also improperly “vouched” for the case, telling the grand jury repeatedly she would “never” ask them to charge anyone if she didn’t think there was probable cause. She also had improper contact with two grand jurors outside the official proceedings that she later had to put on the record as a “mea culpa,” the transcripts showed.

Those alleged missteps will be the hot topic Wednesday afternoon at a hearing in another high-profile case Mecklenburg handled: the sweeping COVID-19 testing fraud charges against ex-Loretto Hospital executive Anosh Ahmed and three alleged co-conspirators.

Lawyers for Ahmed, who is jailed in Serbia and challenging extradition, on Tuesday joined a push to dismiss the indictment based on similar alleged misconduct in the grand jury, including vouching, disclosure of off-the-record negotiations with a defense attorney, and “inflammatory characterizations of the defendants, including name-calling and folk-wisdom metaphors.”

On a separate track, lawyers for the Broadview Six are ramping up for what could turn into lengthy hearings over alleged prosecutorial misconduct, focusing not only on Mecklenburg but also decisions by others in the office to redact large portions of the grand jury transcript that was handed to U.S. District Judge April Perry for review.

The defense is also seeking any communications potentially showing the White House put pressure on the U.S. attorney’s office to indict the controversial case, including from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and top deputy Aakash Singh, who has been deeply involved in immigration-related prosecutions across the country, including Midway Blitz.

As the controversy has intensified, a growing number of local Democratic officials, including Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, have called for Boutros to resign, and earlier this week a group of more than 100 former Chicago federal prosecutors released an open letter saying Boutros has “tarnished the reputation” of the storied office and demanded he “stand above and apart from political fealty.”

Boutros, meanwhile, has said he was completely unaware of Mecklenburg’s inappropriate vouching and ex-parte communications with the Broadview Six jurors until late April and moved to dismiss the felony indictment immediately after hearing about it.

“That was the first time any issue of vouching rose to my level, and, frankly, to the level of anyone in the front office,” Boutros told Perry at the May 21 hearing where the remaining misdemeanor counts were dropped. “I will also tell your honor that I was completely unaware of any ex parte communications that took place in the third instance until I became aware of the grand jury transcripts.”

Boutros also said, however, he was aware in “realtime” of the excusing of grand jurors that had taken place in the second grand jury session and that he “immediately called off that grand jury session.”

He said he notified U.S. District Chief Judge Virginia Kendall, who oversees the grand juries in the district, that he was aware of the issues, and that his office decided to go back before the same grand jury a third time to avoid the appearance of any improper “forum shopping.”

Before that final session began, Boutros himself made a rare appearance before the grand jury and gave a pep talk about their constitutional duties, according to an unusual report released by Boutros’ office last week.

He also told jurors that if they felt like they could not be impartial in immigration-related cases, “I would ask that you raise your hand and identify yourself, because we have a different procedure for that.”

Boutros defended his appearance before the grand jury in his report, saying its importance “cannot be overstated” given the animosity and bias that had shown itself in previous grand jury sessions.

“In such uncharted and unprecedented circumstances, extraordinary measures may be required to restore the rule of law,” the report stated in a “conclusion” paragraph.

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