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United States Attorney Andrew S. Boutros Announces Sweeping Reforms to Internal Grand Jury Practices and Disclosures
Remediation Plan Includes Most Substantial and Significant Changes in Decades
Andrew S. Boutros, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, announced a series of sweeping internal reforms to the Office’s grand jury practices and disclosures that took effect yesterday, May 26, 2026.
The remediation plan, which represents the most substantial and significant internal changes to the Office’s grand jury procedures in decades, will streamline the Office’s grand jury processes and disclosures.
The new process moving forward will be more transparent, effective, and impactful while greatly reducing the likelihood of mistakes and errors.
The important reforms, which took effect yesterday for all grand jury presentations in the Northern District of Illinois, establish clear and unequivocal expectations and rules for federal prosecutors related to grand jury disclosures and the timing of those disclosures.
Among the many changes in the remediation plan are increased and expanded education about grand jury presentations, including extensive, deep-dive training from national experts outside the Office. U.S. Attorney Boutros and the Department of Justice have also taken swift action related to internal personnel matters.
“One of the benefits of being the first Chicago U.S. Attorney to have previously been Chair of White Collar in private practice is that I have represented and advised as my own personal clients some of the largest public and other companies and their audit committees, boards, C-suite executives, and others in highly sensitive and bet-the-company government and internal investigations,” said U.S. Attorney Boutros.
“Everybody who has handled high-stakes corporate cases knows that in addition to the importance of thorough, honest, and objective investigations, there must also be remediation, reforms, and process improvements to allow organizations to accept responsibility and make sure that the same mistakes don’t happen again. What I have formulated and thereafter implemented on Tuesday of this week are among the most sweeping reforms to address root-cause issues in the Northern District of Illinois’s federal prosecutorial practices and procedures, especially as they relate to the grand jury and grand jury disclosures.
“They also make the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s Office among, if not the leading district in the country on grand jury disclosures. These remediations should also be deeply curative and put to rest once and for all the divergent practices that have existed across the Office for decades, including from one Assistant U.S. Attorney to another as well as from one generation to the next. That’s because these are clear, bright line rules that everyone must abide by, which should streamline and simplify the decision-making and disclosure process, as opposed to bedevil it. It also should all but eliminate points of contention between federal prosecutor and defense counsel as it relates to these grand jury issues.”
After learning of certain conduct by the government in the grand jury during a recent case, the U.S. Attorney’s Office immediately moved to dismiss the indictment in that case and proactively initiated an immediate review of other grand jury presentations that could have been impacted in a similar fashion.
The inquiry has included both a root cause analysis into the Office’s practices and procedures generally, as well as an exam of any cases by the AUSAs who went into the grand jury in that case that could have been impacted by similar conduct. The Office’s review is far along but remains ongoing.
In addition, the Office has proactively reached out to the defendants’ attorneys in other cases handled by those AUSAs and has agreed to give them the “minutes” from the grand jury sessions in those cases. “Minutes” from a grand jury session include the highly secretive portion where AUSAs, as legal advisor to the grand jury, speak to grand jurors about the law—and sometimes the application of the law to the facts—without a witness present.
The reforms announced today, many of which are being implemented for the first time anywhere in the country, will transform and modernize the Office’s procedures, while continuing to adhere to the longstanding tradition that a prosecutor serves as “one of the most beneficent forces in our society,” as then-Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert H. Jackson shared in his seminal 1940 address, “The Federal Prosecutor.” Attorney General Jackson remarked that the prosecutor’s “powers have been granted to our law-enforcement agencies because it seems necessary that such a power to prosecute be lodged somewhere. This authority has been granted by people who really wanted the right thing done—wanted crime eliminated—but also wanted the best in our American traditions preserved.”
In announcing his reforms to the Office, U.S. Attorney Boutros thanked the Office’s Assistant U.S. Attorneys for all that they do for the people of the Northern District of Illinois: “Thank you for your hard work. Thank you for being on the front lines keeping our communities safe, making sure our victims are heard, protecting the public fisc, and working to hold accountable those defendants who commit serious crimes, all while doing so in the very best traditions of the Office and the Department. After all, the motto of the Department is ‘Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur,’ meaning, ‘Who prosecutes on behalf of Justice.’”
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Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
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