Douglas DePodesta, the former head of the FBI’s Chicago field office, says he was forced to leave his job after being unfairly blamed for the collapse of a case against six people who protested the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. He made the allegations in a lawsuit filed Monday against senior Justice Department officials.
The lawsuit claims federal prosecutors pursued politically driven cases against Chicago demonstrators before collecting sufficient evidence. DePodesta says his superiors told him FBI Director Kash Patel wanted him gone, and that he was later pressured to resign over the summer.
“I saw the writing on the wall,” DePodesta said.
He accuses Andrew Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, of trying to shift blame onto him after the case known as the “Broadview Six” unraveled earlier this year.
On the day the lawsuit was filed, U.S. District Judge April Perry ordered Boutros and three assistant U.S. attorneys to testify under oath on Nov. 16. Perry said there was a sufficient factual basis to investigate whether prosecutors had knowingly made false statements to the court.
Federal prosecutors charged about 30 people during Operation Midway Blitz, an immigration enforcement operation in Chicago. Many of those cases have since been dropped or dismissed.
DePodesta’s complaint says the Justice Department pressured Boutros to bring felony charges against protesters. It alleges that Boutros emailed DePodesta demanding FBI investigations into people because of their political views or associations, and urged assistant prosecutors to file charges before examining the evidence. In some instances, the complaint says, he sought felonies when prosecutors favored misdemeanors or no charges.
Last October, Boutros charged six people with conspiring to obstruct a federal officer, a felony, over their actions at a protest outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, a Chicago suburb.
Grand jury transcripts later provided to the court showed that jurors twice declined to indict the six, according to reporting by The Associated Press. Boutros dropped the charges in May as the court began examining possible prosecutorial misconduct.
DePodesta’s attorneys say Boutros repeatedly told officials in Washington that DePodesta was responsible for the case’s failure, in an effort to draw attention away from his own conduct. DePodesta denied the accusations to FBI leaders, and the lawsuit says they acknowledged that political pressure generated by Boutros was behind his departure.
The complaint also alleges Boutros told Justice Department leaders that DePodesta and his sister-in-law, Nancy DePodesta, an attorney for one of the six defendants, had conspired to destroy the case.
Nancy DePodesta said her brother-in-law took his professional and ethical responsibilities seriously. She called it “heartbreaking and shameful” that he was forced out over what she described as apparently false rumors spread by Boutros.
In September, one of the prosecutors involved in the Broadview Six case resigned abruptly. In her resignation letter, she accused Boutros of scapegoating and publicly vilifying her, and asked the court to recognize her as an independent party in the proceedings.
The former defendants have asked Perry to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible misconduct. At an Oct. 1 hearing, the judge ordered further fact-finding into communications between Boutros’ office and Justice Department leadership.
Boutros has previously denied that politics influenced his charging decisions. The Justice Department was asked for comment.
