AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
NPR's Ryan Lucas confirms a story CNN broke about a new investigation by the Department of Justice.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: The investigation is being handled by the U.S. attorney's office in the Northern District of Illinois, and it stems from a lawsuit that E. Jean Carroll filed and won against Trump.
RASCOE: In 2023, Carroll won a civil judgment in New York against President Trump for sexually abusing her and defaming her and another civil judgment for defamation the next year. The U.S. attorney's office in Illinois is the same office sharply criticized in another case by a federal judge just this month. Ankush Khardori worked in the DOJ's criminal fraud division during President Trump's first term, and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
ANKUSH KHARDORI: Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: So as we say, like, a New York case is being looked into by a Chicago office, how wide-reaching is that ability for the DOJ to handpick U.S. attorneys' offices to look into cases?
KHARDORI: So, I mean, at the investigation stage, you know, it can be fairly broad because you haven't yet charged a case. But once you get to the charging stage, then some legal requirements start to kick in, in terms of, you know, where you can actually charge the relevant offense. Now, as you can imagine, usually, [inaudible] tries to make sure that, given the facts of the case, the prosecutor investigating the case can actually properly charge the case. As your question sort of suggested, it's very unclear here what the connection is between a New York proceeding and the Chicago prosecutor. So this is very, very unusual.
RASCOE: Is there any precedent for this?
KHARDORI: Oh, I think this is uncharted territory on several different levels. I mean, this particular investigation, right? The idea that there - we would have another prosecutor looking at this case from a different jurisdiction - very, very unusual. Also the origin of the investigation appears to be tied to the president's anger about this case and the circumstances that gave rise to it. According to the reporting, the investigation is focused on the funding of the case. That too is very, very unusual because it is not illegal for someone else to pay for someone else's legal costs or attorney's fees.
RASCOE: The office in question here in Chicago is led by U.S. attorney Andrew Boutros. It just dropped all the remaining charges in a controversial case about a confrontation between protesters and an immigration agent. What did you read into the comments that the judge in that case made when prosecutors asked to drop the charges?
KHARDORI: Yeah. You know, this was a really remarkable hearing. The judge was very angry, it seemed, from the language and the transcript and the reporting from those who were present about the very delayed dismissal of the charges, which appeared to be tied to the fact that the judge required the prosecutors to produce grand jury transcripts that showed that there had been some misconduct by the prosecutors in the grand jury charging the case. Then she said essentially that the office had lost her trust and perhaps the trust of the judges - the other judges in the district. That is the sort of comment that judges make exceedingly rarely and exceedingly carefully. So that right there is raising some red flags. I would also just add this is, like, not the first judge in a prominent major metropolitan jurisdiction that has made a comment like this.
RASCOE: The DOJ brought cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James in the Eastern District of Virginia, but a judge dismissed them because he said the prosecutor wasn't properly appointed, and that was Lindsey Halligan, this Trump ally who was brought in because her predecessor wouldn't bring the charges. Now Comey is indicted in the Eastern District of North Carolina on different charges. Do you think the failure of the Virginia case about congressional testimony will figure into the North Carolina case, which is about a social media post? Like, will they have any effect on each other?
KHARDORI: Well, I would only say only in the atmospheric sense that, you know, jurors who are asked to sit on the North Carolina case may very well be aware of that prior dismissal. They may be asked about it during the voir dire process and asked if they can set that to the side. But for sure, you know, something like that colors, I think, everyone's assessment of how the Justice Department is pursuing these, not just, you know, run-of-the-mill cases or cases that happen to concern people who are not public figures, like the Broadview case in Chicago, but also Comey and others.
RASCOE: So U.S. attorneys, they are political appointees, but that doesn't necessarily make them political actors. They're also directing - like, U.S. attorneys direct career attorneys in these 94 offices across the country. Talk to me about the line there between these 94 U.S. attorneys who are confirmed by the Senate and these, you know, attorneys who are doing the day-to-day work in those 94 federal offices.
KHARDORI: Yeah. You know, it's a very, very important distinction. The U.S. attorneys themselves, yes, they're politically appointed, but they are not supposed to act in a political or partisan manner. So if they're doing their job properly, they will sometimes use their independent judgment to produce outcomes that the White House may not like. That is what's supposed to happen. Now we're seeing, I think, U.S. attorneys who are much, much more pliant and much more willing to do what the Trump White House wants them to do.
Now, the line attorneys are supposed to themselves be kind of a bulwark against prosecutorial abuse. We are seeing this too, line attorneys in various offices across the country who are quitting because they don't want to be involved in certain cases. And that's an important signal to the public. My hope is that we will see more line attorneys as these sort of cases start to progress further, standing up and saying, you know, this is not an appropriate thing to do. That is an important line of defense, too.
RASCOE: That's former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
KHARDORI: Thanks for having me.
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