The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Chicago field office sued the Department of Justice on Monday, saying he was forced out of his job and used as a “scapegoat” for Andrew S. Boutros, the U.S. attorney in Chicago.
Douglas DePodesta, who abruptly resigned in July, named Mr. Boutros as a defendant in the lawsuit, accusing him of spearheading politically motivated prosecutions of protesters during the Trump administration’s 2025 immigration crackdown in Illinois and then blaming Mr. DePodesta when those cases fell apart.
Mr. Boutros engineered Mr. DePodesta’s resignation by telling his superiors at the Justice Department that Mr. DePodesta had “conspired to destroy” one case against a group of protesters known as the Broadview Six, the lawsuit said.
“To deflect attention from his own malfeasance, Boutros began a campaign within the Department of Justice to blame DePodesta for the unraveling of the case,” the lawsuit said.
The 38-page lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago on Monday, detailed extraordinary allegations against top Justice Department officials in Washington, including the F.B.I. director Kash Patel and Mr. Boutros, whose tenure in Chicago has been marked by high-profile prosecutorial failures and a deluge of staff resignations.
It seeks damages including a reinstatement of Mr. DePodesta’s job — which he had held for nearly two years — along with back pay and other financial compensation.
Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for Mr. Boutros’s office, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Mr. Boutros said in court earlier this year that he was upset by what he had learned about the grand jury proceedings.
“No one acted with the intent to mislead your honor, and I think that they were following your order to give the law,” Mr. Boutros said, referring to the prosecutors’ conduct.
Mr. Boutros was appointed by the Trump administration as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in 2025, and since then he has pursued cases that critics consider overtly political in nature.
The most highly publicized of those prosecutions was a case in late 2025 against the Broadview Six, a group of people who had been arrested while protesting at a federal immigration detention site near Chicago during the Trump administration’s Operation Midway Blitz. Prosecutors said that the protesters had banged on a federal vehicle that was attempting to enter the site, blocking it and damaging a side mirror.
After initially failing to secure an indictment, the government eventually persuaded a grand jury to indict the protesters on charges of interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with an agent.
But the government’s case fell apart in embarrassing fashion for Mr. Boutros’s office over missteps and major breaches of protocol by prosecutors. Judge April M. Perry said in her federal courtroom in May that she was shocked by the actions of prosecutors in Mr. Boutros’s office.
Much of the criticism fell directly on Mr. Boutros. In June, more than 100 former federal prosecutors, including a former U.S. attorney in Chicago, signed a letter citing a “failure of leadership” in the office and urged Mr. Boutros to “stand above and apart from political fealty.”
All charges against the Broadview Six protesters were eventually dropped.
In the lawsuit, Mr. DePodesta said that Mr. Boutros personally pushed for indictments against the group, but a grand jury that heard evidence was unpersuaded. At one point, the lawsuit said, Mr. Boutros “took the extraordinary step of personally addressing the grand jury to admonish them about any biases they might have in ‘immigration’ cases and urging them to disqualify themselves if they felt they were biased.”
The lawsuit also describes disagreements over the case that occurred behind the scenes at the Justice Department. Some assistant U.S. attorneys resisted the push from Mr. Boutros to charge the protesters, but he instructed them to proceed, the lawsuit said.
At one point after the implosion of the Broadview Six case, the lawsuit said, Mr. DePodesta was confronted by a deputy director of the F.B.I., who said that he had been told by Mr. Boutros that Mr. DePodesta had conspired with his sister-in-law, a lawyer representing one of the defendants, to destroy the case.
Mr. DePodesta denied trying to destroy the case and told the official that he had never discussed the charges with his sister-in-law.
But in July, about one month after that conversation, Mr. DePodesta was contacted by another senior F.B.I. official who told him that Mr. Patel, the director of the F.B.I., wanted him to resign.
Mr. DePodesta “understood that he had no real choice in the matter,” the lawsuit said. “The writing was on the wall — he had to resign. DePodesta knew that if he did not resign as instructed, he would be terminated.”
Ronald S. Safer, a lawyer for Mr. DePodesta, said that Mr. DePodesta “seeks accountability, the correction of the record, and restoration of his professional reputation.”
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