Transcripts detail grand jurors’ doubts about Broadview Six case

In the days following a marked escalation in the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz mass deportation campaign in early October — including the shooting of a U.S. citizen by a federal immigration agent a — a panel of grand jurors gathered behind closed doors in the Dirksen Federal Courthouse.

That particular group was nearing the end of its 18-month grand jury service, and had so far spent hundreds of hours hearing evidence brought by various federal prosecutors and signing off on indictments. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg, a near two-decade veteran of the Department of Justice, had appeared in front of the grand jury enough times to develop a sort of bond with the group.

That bond, she told the grand jurors on Oct. 9, led her to ask her superiors if she could wait to present “a very interesting case” to them.

“I said I want to go in front of the Thursday grand jury because I know you and I trust you, and you know me and you trust me, and I would never ask you to charge somebody if I didn't think there was probable cause,” Mecklenburg told the grand jury.

With that, Mecklenburg introduced the case against a group of Democratic activists, local elected officials and candidates that would come to be known as the “Broadview Six.”

But the afternoon did not go smoothly, as laid out in grand jury transcripts released Tuesday in an extremely rare move as part of an inquiry into how the now-imploded case came to be in the first place.

Read the Broadview Six grand jury transcripts here

Prosecutors played video footage from a protest two weeks prior outside of a federal immigration facility in suburban Broadview. During the Sept. 26 protest, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle advanced toward the facility, driving slowly through the crowd, which responded by closing in on the SUV and banging on its sides. The encounter left the vehicle with broken windshield wipers and the word “PIG” scratched into its side, the grand jury was told.

But during that first session, grand jurors declined to indict the six protesters, handing up a rare “no bill” indicating members of the grand jury did not believe prosecutors presented enough evidence to establish probable cause of a crime.

Nevertheless, Mecklenburg and newly minted Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Skiba appeared in front of the grand jury again the next Thursday, Oct. 16. She began the afternoon session telling grand jurors that she “did not do my job” the previous week and didn’t explain the law “well enough” to secure an indictment.

Not long into the presentation, however, one grand juror made clear their feelings on having to hear the same case again.

“I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of s--- then and I still think it is,” the grand juror said.

Mecklenburg then dismissed the grand juror, telling them to “have a good evening.”

Case collapse

U.S. District Judge April Perry released the grand jury transcripts nearly three weeks after the case fell apart in dramatic fashion just days before it was set to go to trial in her courtroom.

Lawyers for the protesters had been pushing to see the transcripts for months, but their calls got louder in March after prosecutors suddenly dropped all charges against two of the six defendants in the face of pressure to clarify the indictment.

Then in late April, on the same day Perry called a hearing to ask prosecutors for the unredacted transcripts, prosecutors made another surprise announcement: they’d decided to drop the felony conspiracy charge. While defense attorneys framed it as a win for their clients, they also suggested the feds’ move was a strategic way to avoid having to hand over unredacted grand jury transcripts.

In the days leading up to the four remaining defendants’ rare federal misdemeanor trial in late May, defense attorneys made a final plea for Perry to review the grand jury transcripts. After she did, the consequences came swiftly.

After a closed-door hearing in which the judge rebuked prosecutors for both apparent misconduct in front of the grand jury and for having previously obscured parts of the transcripts that would have revealed the misconduct earlier, she canceled the trial.

According to minutes of that May 21 sealed hearing, Perry characterized Mecklenburg’s opening statement urging trust of the case as “putting her personal credibility and trustworthiness on the line in support of the charges” — also known as improper prosecutorial vouching.

That same day, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros took the extraordinary step of appearing in Perry’s courtroom and dropping the remaining charges, while taking responsibility for the alleged prosecutorial misconduct. Soon after, Mecklenburg was fired from her new job while other cases she’d previously overseen have come into question.

Dismissed grand jurors

The transcripts released Tuesday didn’t include Boutros’ approximately four-minute speech to the grand jury at the beginning of their Oct. 23, session, but Mecklenburg’s first recorded remarks echoed them.

“If you still feel like you are operating from feelings that prevent you from deliberating fairly with your fellow Grand Jurors and from applying the facts — the law to the facts here, then tell your fellow Grand Jurors that you can't deliberate,” she admonished.

Mecklenburg then launched into a public acknowledgment of having talked to two grand jurors outside of the grand jury room prior to the beginning of the session, which she said “I'm not supposed to do.”

In both cases, she claimed the grand jurors apologized to her for their comments the previous week. It's unclear whether either of the men Mecklenburg referenced were the same grand jurors she dismissed during the Oct. 16 session.

Before characterizing the case as “a crock of s---,” the same grand juror asked Mecklenburg if she was “actually presenting any new actual facts or just a different viewpoint on your side?”

The prosecutor responded that she was “feeling the skepticism already” and asked the grand juror whether they were “going to be able to listen with an open mind,” urging them to “tell me the truth.”

“I — no,” the grand juror replied.

“Okay,” Mecklenburg said. “Then you have to go.”

In his May 21 appearance in front of Perry, Boutros said he was aware of Mecklenburg’s dismissal of grand jurors at the time, telling the judge that “as soon as I became aware of it, I called off that grand jury session,” he said.

But Boutros claimed that he was unaware of Mecklenburg’s alleged prosecutorial vouching nor her communications with grand jurors outside the grand jury room until late April. When he found out, he said, he made the decision to drop the felony conspiracy charge.

‘It was not luck’

From the beginning, grand jurors made clear their doubts about the case. During the first session on Oct. 9, members of the grand jury only heard from an FBI agent, and not the ICE employee who drove the SUV.

“Couldn’t he have stopped?” one asked, to which Mecklenburg reminded the grand jury of an FBI agent’s testimony to the group that the driver, an ICE employee, was “afraid to stop” for fear of the crowd breaking the vehicle’s windows and pulling him out.

When a grand juror retorted that the reason no one was injured was “just luck,” Mecklenburg vehemently disagreed.

“No, it wasn't luck. Oh, no, it wasn't — sir, it was not luck,” she said. “It was his calmness and his judgment to drive as slowly as possible as he could and not hit anybody. It wasn't just luck.”