When Chicago’s top federal prosecutor is asked if his office takes marching orders from Washington, he doesn’t mince words.
“You should write this down,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros recently told a Chicago Sun-Times reporter.
“[There is] not a single case, ok, involving politics in our decision making. Full stop. Period. Zero,” Boutros said. “And anyone who says otherwise is misstating reality. And anyone who says otherwise is an armchair expert who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Period.”
He said he isn’t done with Operation Midway Blitz. Nor public corruption — he said people should “stay tuned.” And having reached the end of a volatile first year in office, in which President Donald Trump has been accused of weaponizing the Justice Department, Boutros said he has cases to bring “based on facts, law and the equities.”
But his first year also featured an “unprecedented exodus” of prosecutors from the office he leads, critics note. Most section chiefs left. And convictions have yet to emerge from the flurry of charges the office filed during Midway Blitz, the aggressive deportation campaign that hit the Chicago area last year.
It charged Marimar Martinez, the woman shot by a Border Patrol agent and labeled a “domestic terrorist” before the charges were dropped. And Juan Espinoza Martinez, the man acquitted of putting a hit on then-U.S. Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino.
In his most extensive commentary to date about Midway Blitz, Boutros acknowledged all did not go according to plan. Especially when it came to working with an “out of town” group of agents.
But Boutros said repeatedly, “We want to get it right.”
He made his remarks in a wide-ranging conversation with the Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune to mark Tuesday’s one-year anniversary of the day he took office.
Federal prosecutors under ‘unprecedented pressures’
Boutros, the son of immigrants from Egypt, is the first person of color to hold the office. He’s overtly patriotic, calls Chicago his “adopted
