Chicago FBI boss forced into early retirement, skips lunch with US Attorney Boutros

Shortly after Douglas DePodesta became head of the FBI’s storied Chicago bureau, he told the Tribune he would love to call it a career in his adopted hometown when he hit the mandatory retirement age in a few years.

“I think I have a lot left in my tank,” DePodesta said in May 2025.

Instead, DePodesta’s impressive FBI career came to an abrupt end this week. He was forced to retire early due to a falling out with bosses in the Justice Department, apparently over issues with his fealty to the Trump administration’s political agenda, or lack thereof.

In a farewell note to colleagues last week, DePodesta was clear that some type of conflict induced his departure, though he offered no specifics.

“I’ve never backed down from a fight, as long as it meant our personnel could continue serving the FBI’s mission,” DePodesta wrote in the message. “Unfortunately, that has proved unpopular over time and my departure is a consequence of that.”

Both the FBI and Department of Justice have said they do not comment on personnel matters. Shortly after news of DePodesta’s retirement plans broke, however, one of the FBI’s official social media accounts did just that, posting that DePodesta was at odds with the bureau’s mission under President Donald Trump.

“It’s simple: Anyone who is not on board with THIS FBI under the leadership of President Trump—which has achieved the lowest murder rate ever—is free to leave,” the bureau’s “rapid response” social media account on X said in response to a post by Kyle Seraphin, an ex-FBI agent and frequent critic of the current administration.

DePodesta, 55, who joined the FBI in 2002 and had served as special agent in charge in Chicago for just under two years, officially retired Monday, two years shy of the FBI’s mandatory retirement age of 57. He could not be reached for comment.

The news of DePodesta’s departure caught nearly everyone by surprise. Asked about it at a bill-signing event on Sunday, Gov. JB Pritzker said he interacted often with DePodesta and thought he “was doing a, really, a terrific job” with “no politics involved in it.”

“I do not know what the purpose of removing him was,” Pritzker said. “I know there have been write-ups that perhaps it was political in some way. … I just know that we need to keep politics out of law enforcement and make sure that we’re going after the bad guys — guns, drugs, gangs.”

Meanwhile, speculation has continued to swirl that his sudden departure was spurred by embattled U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, who has championed an anti-violence strategy of quick-hit arrests that has become increasingly at odds with the FBI’s traditionally methodical approach to building cases.

Boutros has been under intense scrutiny for weeks following the collapse of the “Broadview Six” case against Operation Midway Blitz protesters, with his office forced to dismiss a series of cases due to alleged misconduct before the grand jury and judges at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse calling the credibility of Boutros’ office into question.

The day before news broke that DePodesta was being forced out, Boutros was in Washington, D.C., standing before reporters with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to announce charges against three reputed Tren de Aragua gang members accused in a kidnapping and murder plot in Chicago.

The next day, Boutros held a news conference back in Chicago about an unrelated anti-violence initiative and was asked about news reports that he’d played a role in forcing out DePodesta. Boutros said he was caught off guard by the development. In fact, he said he was supposed to have lunch with DePodesta on Tuesday.

“Doug and I are supposed to get together for a lunch on July 7,” Boutros told reporters. “News of his departure was news to me. … I’ll find out if he’s canceling or not, but I hope he doesn’t.”

The lunch did not happen, sources told the Tribune.

At the news conference, Boutros praised DePodesta as a “great partner” who worked closely with him on cases related to Operation Midway Blitz, both public prosecutions and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that Boutros said helped “de-escalate situations” that could have become even more volatile.

“You all don’t know the stuff that we did together to keep Chicago safe,” Boutros said.

He also said while DePodesta would be missed, the bureau’s work will go on without him.

“It’s the old expression, ‘The king is dead, long live the king,’ right?” Boutros said. “So new leadership will come in, and that’s just the way things work.”

Known as an excellent manager of people, DePodesta, a Detroit native, rose through the ranks under both Republican and Democratic administrations and adhered to the bureau’s traditional apolitical approach to law enforcement — a concept that has quickly been jettisoned by Patel, who has forced out many supervisors perceived as unsupportive of the Trump agenda.

In his farewell note, which was later posted online, DePodesta quoted Patel’s predecessor, former Director Chris Wray, praising employees for having “stayed true to the values that define who we are, and to the qualities for which we stand: Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity.”

DePodesta was selected by Wray for the Chicago position after leading smaller offices in Detroit and Memphis. He landed here a week and a half before the Democratic National Convention in August 2024 and quickly developed a good working relationship with Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling, whose own departure was coincidentally announced on the same day as DePodesta’s retirement.

After the change in administration in early 2025, DePodesta, who’d been tasked with going after drug cartels during his 14 years as a special agent in Chicago, made halting the flow of the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl one of his top priorities, creating a 12-member squad with agents from various jurisdictions to focus on trafficking by the cartels in an attempt to disrupt a complex network that spans from Central and South America to Asia.

In his interview with the Tribune months into Trump’s second term, DePodesta acknowledged shifting priorities for the bureau, but said that’s typical whenever there’s a change in leadership.

“This is my fourth director,” he said of Patel. “And each time a new director comes in there are new priorities and new shifts, so we are seeing a little bit of a shift in priorities now. But I can tell you our core mission is the same: Uphold the Constitution and protect the American people.”

At the time, the Chicago FBI, which has more than 1,000 total employees, was increasingly being asked to help with another top Trump administration priority: immigration enforcement. DePodesta told the Tribune he had embedded some of the FBI’s 450 agents on the street helping other agencies “effect arrests,” but insisted the targets were “people that have removal orders that have a criminal history — murderers, rapists.”

That early immigration enforcement effort later turned into Midway Blitz, the aggressive deportation campaign last fall that led to the arrests of thousands of immigrants in the Chicago area, the vast majority of whom had no violent criminal records. At the height of that two-month operation, DePodesta had large swaths of his available agents assisting in immigration-related cases.

One of those investigations led to the Broadview Six indictment against a group of protesters with ties to local Democratic politics, which was beset with allegations of political targeting by the Trump administration.

The case exploded in May when it was revealed that a prosecutor in Boutros’ office had improperly “vouched” for the strength of the evidence before the grand jury and dismissed several members of the panel who were skeptical of the case, including one who called it a “crock of (expletive).”

A judge is expected to decide next month whether to hold hearings into what happened in the Broadview case, including who in Boutros’ office had a hand in redacting portions of the grand jury transcripts that revealed the alleged misconduct before turning them over to the court for inspection.

DePodesta was on a short leave of absence from his post when the Broadview Six case was indicted in October and has never made any public statements about it.

As the scandal at the U.S. attorney’s office intensified, the FBI became embroiled in another controversial case involving an undercover firearms trafficking sting in Country Club Hills that led to the shooting of two suspects.

Boutros’ office opted to dismiss charges against three defendants after bystander video surfaced that contradicted the sworn affidavit of the FBI agent substantiating the criminal complaint, which was based on information given to him by agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The Chicago FBI, then headed by DePodesta, issued a statement at the time saying it was prosecutors who “ultimately determine whether to seek criminal charges and juries make the final determination on whether the evidence meets the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Magistrate Judge Keri Holleb Hotaling has called for a hearing on potential sanctions, including the testimony of the FBI agent and any ATF agents that supplied information for the affidavit.

“These are serious things,” Hotaling said. “I don’t want to be saying an FBI agent acted in bad faith or made material misrepresentations. I want to understand the actual facts and understand all of that before I would make any type of finding such as that.”

The U.S. attorney’s office has since objected, saying Hotaling does not have authority to hold a hearing on a dismissed complaint or to make any potential findings of contempt of court.

But such controversy is rare for the Chicago FBI, the agency’s third-largest field office. In comments about DePodesta’s retirement over the weekend, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said that while his office has certainly had issues with “unconstitutional acts” by federal law enforcement in general, at the local level the relationships have remained strong.

“We’ve worked closely with the FBI,” Raoul said at the bill-signing with Pritzker. “They’ve referred cases to our office for prosecution. We’ve worked on internet crimes against children, gun trafficking, a wide variety of fraud, wide variety of matters, and Doug has been a good career leader, and I hope whoever succeeds him continues in that.”

Raoul also said DePodesta’s departure has highlighted concerns over the ongoing “leakage” of career professionals from federal law enforcement agencies.

“This was an abrupt departure of a good man,” he said.

• Tribune reporter Dan Petrella contributed.

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com