A magistrate judge has ordered U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros into court for a July 9 hearing to discuss “potential violations” of an order sealing a criminal case involving alleged Tren de Aragua gang members that was touted this week by top officials in the Justice Department.
It’s the latest shoe to drop in an ongoing credibility crisis swirling around Boutros’ office. U.S. Magistrate Judge Laura McNally entered the order Thursday, explaining she “has serious concerns regarding the government’s compliance … with the order sealing this case.”
“United States Attorney Andrew Boutros is ordered to attend this hearing in person,” McNally wrote.
A Boutros spokesman did not immediately comment Friday.
The order comes in a case leveling federal charges of kidnapping conspiracy against Josue Pacheco Torres, Kleiver Monasterio Briceno and Julian Pachano.
A now-unsealed criminal complaint alleges the defendants are a group of Venezuelan nationals, involved with Tren de Aragua, who participated in a plot to kidnap and kill a male whose body was discovered by police May 19 inside an abandoned Chicago apartment building.
McNally on June 29 ordered that the complaint and other documents in the case be sealed “until the time of arrest of all defendants in this case or further order of the court.” She said the order “does not prohibit law enforcement personnel from disclosing the complaint, affidavit, and arrest warrants as necessary to facilitate the enforcement of criminal law.”
Boutros discussed the case Wednesday during a press conference with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, laying out the brutal details of the crime.
“A man kidnapped from a park in Chicago in broad daylight,” Boutros said. “Beaten, held against his will, taken to an abandoned building and shot multiple times and left in a bathtub. All in the name of Tren de Aragua. And to show just how brutal and merciless this gang is, someone then went and called the victim’s mother and told her where she could find her lifeless son’s body.”
Prosecutors called McNally’s chambers at 10:05 a.m. that same day seeking an order unsealing the complaint with certain redactions, claiming “it needed to obtain a ruling within the next 15 minutes,” McNally wrote on the court docket.
The feds also hand-delivered the proposed redactions to her chambers, the judge wrote.
Because of other court business, McNally said she was not able to take up the request immediately, so the seal remained in place. Prosecutors sent a written motion to McNally’s “proposed order inbox” at 1:25 p.m., she explained.
The judge then told prosecutors at 4:57 p.m. she would handle the motion when it was formally filed on the docket. But as of 7 p.m. Wednesday, no such filing had appeared, McNally wrote. So she ordered the feds to formally file the motion they’d sent to her inbox but added, “the government’s motion is denied.”
When prosecutors originally sought to seal the criminal complaint on June 29, they “represented to this court that the public filing of the complaint before the arrest warrants could be executed could alert the defendants and result in their flight and the destruction of evidence,” McNally wrote on Wednesday.
“The court relied on the sincerity and truthfulness of that representation, and it granted the motion,” she continued. “As of the date of the motion to unseal, less than 48 hours after the arrest warrants were issued, the government represents that the defendants have not all been arrested. One defendant remains at large.”
“The government has offered no reason to believe that its prior concerns regarding flight or the destruction of evidence have been addressed, and the modest redactions proposed in the motion are, in the court’s view, insufficient to achieve the protections sought by the government in their initial motion to entirely seal the complaint.”
McNally presided over Torres’ initial appearance Thursday, and she granted an oral motion to unseal the case, records show. There’s no record of the other two defendants appearing in court.
McNally has become the latest judge to express concern about Boutros’ office. Controversy has swirled ever since the “Broadview Six” case against a group of Operation Midway Blitz protesters collapsed May 21 over claims of prosecutor misconduct.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman threatened last month to hold a hearing over similar claims in a case tied to Loretto Hospital, but Boutros’ office avoided it by permanently dropping charges against two defendants.
U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland has said Boutros and his leadership team had “created a credibility crisis,” and she questioned the candor of a prosecutor from Boutros’ office during a hearing in a separate fraud case Wednesday.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Keri Holleb Hotaling has also promised to hold a hearing to consider sanctions against the government after video raised doubts about the accuracy of claims in a sworn affidavit in a case tied to the attempted robbery of undercover federal officers in Country Club Hills.