The FBI’s former top agent in Chicago sued Justice Department officials on Monday, claiming he was forced out of the bureau last year over his resistance to “politically motivated investigations” targeting protesters demonstrating against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown.
Douglas DePodesta — who served as special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago field office for two years before what he described as his forced resignation in July — said the city’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, Andrew Boutros, has since sought to scapegoat him for the spectacular collapse of the highest-profile of those cases, a prosecution of six demonstrators who have collectively become known as the “Broadview Six.”
The Broadview Six defendants — including former Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh — were charged with interfering with federal agents outside an immigration holding facility just outside of Chicago. Their case quickly became a flash point in the intense debate over the Trump administration’s enforcement surge in Chicago, known as “Operation Midway Blitz.”
But the case fell apart earlier this year after court proceedings showed that prosecutors in Boutros’s office had sought to influence grand jurors to obtain an indictment and excluded dissenting voices on the panel.
“These politically motivated prosecutions were an unprecedented disaster for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois,” DePodesta’s lawyers wrote in their filing Monday. “The Broadview Six case in particular disintegrated because of improprieties by federal prosecutors, including Boutros himself.”
DePodesta’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago, is the latest legal action taken by former agents and Justice Department personnel who maintain they lost their jobs for resisting what they describe as inappropriately political demands or were fired for partisan reasons since Trump’s return to the White House.
Boutros’s office and spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the suit. Earlier this year, Boutros told the Chicago Sun-Times there was “not a single case, okay, involving politics in our decision-making. Full stop.”
In his lawsuit Monday, DePodesta maintained that he and Boutros had frequently clashed over protest cases even before the Broadview Six charges.
The suit alleges that Boutros sent him emails demanding the agents open probes into “individuals with political views or affiliations in opposition to the Trump administration,” and DePodesta repeatedly questioned whether the FBI should be opening politically motivated investigations.
Though Boutros’s office eventually charged more than 30 protesters with federal crimes tied to protest activity, a large number of those cases later fell apart. Grand juries rejected at least three of those cases, DePodesta said Monday. Prosecutors withdrew charges against at last 20 more. Others ended in acquittals.
After the collapse of the Broadview Six case, “Boutros began a campaign within the Department of Justice to blame [DePodesta] for the unraveling of the case,” the former agent contended in his suit, which names Boutros, Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI director Kash Patel as defendants.
The case has become an enduring scandal for Boutrous’s office, one of the Justice Department’s largest outposts in the Midwest. U.S. District Judge April M. Perry, the judge who was overseeing the case, has since launched an inquiry into prosecutors’ conduct, which could lead to sanctions or criminal contempt charges.
In September, the case’s former lead prosecutor, Sheri H. Mecklenburg, resigned and said Boutros had personally intervened to overrule objections she raised to aspects of the case.
In a resignation letter Mecklenburg later made public, she, too, said she was “retiring under protest” because she had been threatened with termination if she tried to defend herself against misconduct allegations.
In his lawsuit, DePodesta said the “Broadview Six” case exacerbated the tense relations between the U.S. attorney and the FBI’s field office in the city. Though Boutros has maintained the decision to bring the case was his and his alone, DePodesta alleged that the U.S. attorney met with top Justice Department officials in Washington before pursuing the case and knew it was a top political priority.
After the case’s dismissal, Boutros called top FBI officials in Washington and accused DePodesta of working to sink the prosecution in concert with his sister-in-law, a former federal prosecutor turned defense lawyer who was representing one of the defendants, the lawsuit alleges.
DePodesta maintained that he had never spoken to his sister-in-law about the case and that its dismissal was entirely the fault of the prosecutors who had bungled the presentation before the grand jury.
While those assurances seemed to allay FBI leadership for a time, Boutros, according to the lawsuit, continued his attempts to shift blame to DePodesta, repeating the claims about his sister-in-law to Blanche and Patel. Eventually, the suit states, DePodesta was informed he would need to resign.
“DePodesta understood that he had no real choice in the matter,” the former agent’s lawyers said in their filing Monday. “The writing was on the wall — he had to resign. DePodesta knew that if he did not resign as instructed, he would be terminated.”
As DePodesta announced his decision in July, the news of his departure drew an unusually pointed response from an official FBI social media account.
“It’s simple,” the post read. “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.”
DePodesta is asking the court for reinstatement to his position and backpay.
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