CHICAGO — In another sign of the deepening credibility crisis for the Justice Department, a federal judge in Chicago said this week the government’s professed confusion over an upcoming evidentiary hearing in the “Broadview Six” case was “immaterial” and that they failed to comply with her orders for discovery.

The back-and-forth between U.S. District Judge April Perry and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the No. 3 person at the Justice Department, has played out on the public docket this week and left many veteran Chicago attorneys shaking their heads.

It also sets up an unprecedented hearing currently set for Monday where U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and several assistants will have to testify under oath about their actions in the long-running Broadview Six case, which collapsed in May amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

So far, efforts to limit or derail the hearing have been unsuccessful, and there are growing indications it could be an unprecedented spectacle at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, with Boutros possibly being ordered by his bosses in the Attorney General’s Office not to answer certain questions, or even with Boutros asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.

The situation escalated Monday after Woodward filed a motion stating communications with local prosecutors about the Broadview case are privileged and off-limits to Perry’s ongoing inquiry. The DOJ also gave Perry a privilege log, which is supposed to give dates and a short summary of communications and the argument for them being withheld, such as deliberative process.

On Tuesday, Perry responded in a scathing minute order that the privilege log was “noncompliant,” in part because it failed to provide the author or recipient of any emails or which participants were involved in larger email chains — which she’d clearly ordered produced.

The DOJ did turn over one specific item that Perry requested: an email sent to U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros that attached an expedited transcript of the Oct. 9, 2025, grand jury session in the Broadview case. That session ended in a rare “no bill” vote by the grand jury declining to return the indictment.

But Perry said even that submission was lacking because it came in as a single PDF file “which does not provide any metadata about the email or attachment, including any indication as to whether or when they were read.”

“As the Court explained in detail…the point of requesting the 10/14/2025 email and attachment was to provide corroboration for U.S. Attorney Boutros’ claim that he had not read them,” Perry wrote in her order on Tuesday. “The Government’s chosen manner of production thus sheds no light on the only relevant issue.”

Perry gave the DOJ until 3 p.m. Thursday to file a revised production in the event that the deficiencies of the first production “were inadvertent.”

Hours after the judge’s dressing down over the discovery issue, Woodward upped the ante in another filing arguing she’d overstepped her authority by ordering Boutros and other prosecutors to testify. The filing demanded Perry “clarify” her goals for the upcoming hearing, including whether it was to gather evidence for a future criminal contempt proceeding.

“The court has presented the United States Attorney and his subordinates with a Catch-22,” Woodward argued. “They can testify and risk prosecution, or they can assert their rights under the Fifth Amendment and risk antagonizing the court, while it may also be considering non-contempt sanctions.”

Woodward then suggested that the hearing should be called off entirely and let the Justice Department pursue its own internal investigation.

“If the court does not think it currently has sufficient evidence for a (criminal contempt) referral, but also thinks it cannot attain such evidence without conducting an improper inquiry, the solution, however unsatisfying, is to simply not conduct the inquiry and leave the matter to the Executive Branch,” the DOJ filing stated.

On Wednesday morning, Perry shot the idea down in yet another minute order on the public docket. She said she has the inherent authority to have a hearing over factual matters, and noted the DOJ doesn’t even represent most of those who will testify, including three Assistant U.S. attorneys, William Hogan, Matthew Skiba, and Andres Almandarez.

“Ultimately, the Government’s professed lack of clarity about the Court’s inherent authority to ask lawyers who have made misstatements to or misled the Court to explain their actions is immaterial,” Perry wrote. “The Government does not represent at least 3/4 of the individuals who have been asked to testify, two of whom have expressed their willingness to do so.”

She also wrote there “is no indication on the docket that the Government represents the fourth individual” — a reference to Boutros himself.

Richard Kling, a longtime Chicago defense attorney and a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said he’s been practicing in the federal courthouse for decades and has never seen the U.S. attorney’s office or DOJ get called out quite like this.

“I have never seen it, I’ve never heard of anything like it from other lawyers,” Kling said. “Quite frankly it is extraordinary to see.”

Meanwhile, Perry’s latest order provided some clarity on how the hearing will go down on Monday. She said witnesses will be able to give an “uninterrupted oral statement” before she asks follow-up questions, or if they prefer, submit a written statement to the court that is signed under oath.

While no cross-examination will be allowed, Perry said witnesses who are represented by an attorney can confer before answering questions, and that their attorneys may ask “follow-up questions” when she is finished.

Witnesses not represented by an attorney will be allowed to “add anything else they would like to add” at the end of the questioning, she said.

The Broadview Six indictment was one of the most serious cases brought against protesters during Operation Midway Blitz. the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation push last fall. The felony charges alleged the six defendants — most of whom had ties to local Democratic politics — crowded around an ICE agent’s vehicle outside the Broadview ICE facility in September 2025, banged on the car and windows, and pushed against it to hinder and impede its movement.

Boutros was forced to drop all charges in May after it was revealed the lead prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg, had allegedly committed misconduct before the grand jury. The timeline that has emerged since then shows the Broadview case was beset by controversy from its inception.

The grand jury originally refused to approve the indictment on Oct. 9, 2025, and a second session was called off by Boutros’ office after Mecklenburg reported that at least two jurors were excused from voting because they could not be impartial, court records show. Those jurors eventually returned for a third session on Oct. 23 and returned an indictment charging the defendants with a felony conspiracy.

Defense attorneys. meanwhile, alleged the decision to indict the case was politically motivated amid pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration to make an example of them — something Boutros’ office vehemently denied.

On the eve of trial, the U.S. attorney’s office handed over heavily redacted copies of grand jury transcripts for Perry to review that blacked out misconduct that had occurred in those sessions, including Mecklenburg improperly “vouching” for the case in her original presentation, records show.

At a remarkable closed-door session on May 21, Perry told the team of assembled prosecutors the episode was at odds at their sole mission to ensure justice prevails.

“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,” Perry said. “That trust has been broken.”

While Perry has made no finding at this point that there was intentional misconduct in the case, she said at a hearing in October it was clear that “several aspects of this prosecution were very flawed” and that certain representations made to her by Boutros’ office were not accurate. She also said whether a cover-up occurred to hide illegal conduct — or maybe simply something that was “embarrassing” — does not matter.

On Wednesday, attorney Christopher Parente, who represents now-dismissed Broadview Six defendant Brian Straw, noted that in the wake of the scandal, Boutros had promised to rebuild the trust lost with the judiciary. But the DOJ’s latest court filings opposing Perry’s efforts show “accountability and transparency are no longer on the table,” Parente said.

“The U.S. attorney’s office and DOJ appear to believe they are above the law,” Parente said in a statement to the Tribune. “How can the U.S. attorney’s office hold others accountable for fraud and crimes of dishonesty when they refuse accountability for their own untruths and misconduct?”

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