CHICAGO: The former head of the FBI\u2019s Chicago field office says he lost his job after being wrongly blamed for prosecutions that fell apart against six people who protested the federal immigration crackdown in the city, according to a lawsuit he filed Monday.<\/p>\n
Douglas DePodesta, a 24-year veteran of the FBI, says in the suit against top Justice Department officials that federal prosecutors pushed \u201cpolitically motivated prosecutions\u201d against Chicago\u2019s demonstrators before gathering evidence. He says his superiors told him that FBI Director Kash Patel wanted him fired, and he stepped down against his will this summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw the writing on the wall,\u201d DePodesta told The Associated Press on Monday.<\/p>\n
He accused the top federal prosecutor in Illinois, Andrew Boutros, of starting a \u201ccampaign within the Department of Justice to blame\u201d him after the so-called \u201cBroadview Six\u201d case dramatically fell apart earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Boutros\u2019 office declined to comment. The FBI and the Justice Department, which are both named in the suit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
Hours after DePodesta filed the suit, US District Judge April Perry ordered Boutros and three of his assistant attorneys to testify under oath on Nov. 16 in the failed case against the protesters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is more than an adequate factual basis for the Court to pursue an inquiry as to whether willful false statements were made to the court,\u201d Perry wrote in the order.<\/p>\n
Federal prosecutors brought charges against around 30 protesters during the Chicago immigration enforcement operation, called Operation Midway Blitz. Many of those charges have been dropped or dismissed.<\/p>\n
According to DePodesta\u2019s lawsuit, Boutros faced pressure from the Justice Department throughout the crackdown to charge protesters with felonies.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoutros sent DePodesta emails demanding that DePodesta open FBI investigations into individuals with political views or affiliations in opposition to the Trump administration,\u201d DePodesta\u2019s attorneys wrote.<\/p>\n
Boutros often pressured attorneys under him in the US Attorney\u2019s Office for the Northern District of Illinois to press charges \u201cbefore investigating the objective evidence,\u201d and he wanted felony charges when assisting attorneys \u201cfavored misdemeanors or no charges at all,\u201d the suit alleges.<\/p>\n
The office last October charged six people with conspiring to obstruct a federal officer, a felony, for their actions during a protest at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Chicago suburb of Broadview.<\/p>\n
Transcripts turned over to the court, which a judge ordered Boutros\u2019 office to remove redactions from, later revealed that a grand jury twice refused to indict the six, despite prosecutors\u2019 urgings and a highly unusual speech Boutros gave to jurors. Boutros dropped all charges against the six in May as the court moved to investigate possible prosecutorial misconduct.<\/p>\n
Boutros \u201crepeatedly complained to his superiors in Washington\u201d that the failure was DePodesta\u2019s fault \u201cto deflect attention from his own malfeasance,\u201d DePodesta\u2019s attorneys wrote in the suit. DePodesta denied Boutros\u2019 accusations to his superiors at the FBI, and they conceded that he was only being forced out because of the \u201cpolitical pressure Boutros created,\u201d according to the suit.<\/p>\n
The suit alleges Boutros told Justice Department leadership that DePodesta and his sister-in-law Nancy DePodesta, who is an attorney representing one of the six former defendants, \u201cconspired to destroy\u201d the case.<\/p>\n
Nancy DePodesta, who represents Michael Rabbitt, one of the former defendants, confirmed to the AP that she is Douglas DePodesta\u2019s sister-in-law.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no one at the FBI who took their oath of office and their ethical and moral responsibilities more seriously than Doug,\u201d Nancy DePodesta said in a statement to the AP. \u201cIt is both heartbreaking and shameful that he was forced out of his position based on what appear to be utterly false rumors spread by\u201d Boutros, she added.<\/p>\n
In late September, one of the prosecutors on the \u201cBroadview Six\u201d case abruptly resigned, writing in a scathing resignation letter that Boutros had \u201cscapegoated and publicly vilified\u201d her. She filed a motion asking the court to treat her as an independent party going forward.<\/p>\n
The former defendants have asked Judge Perry to appoint a special counsel to look into possible misconduct by prosecutors. At an Oct. 1 hearing, Perry ordered further \u201cfact-finding\u201d about communications between Boutros\u2019 office and Justice Department leadership.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHICAGO: The former head of the FBI\u2019s Chicago field office says he lost his job after being wrongly blamed for prosecutions that fell apart against six people who protested the federal immigration crackdown in the city, according to a lawsuit he filed Monday. Douglas DePodesta, a 24-year veteran of the FBI, says in the suit …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":105299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105285"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105300,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105285\/revisions\/105300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}