Judge hammers Trump DOJ for scrubbing forensic evidence in her misconduct probe

A federal judge rebuked President Donald Trump’s Justice Department for producing emails without the data that could show whether Chicago’s top federal prosecutor read them.

U.S. District Judge April Perry wrote Tuesday that her Oct. 9 order required electronic records to come “with all associated metadata,” including “read receipts, delivery status, and message tracking logs.”

But the two one-page emails that Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward’s office turned over Monday were PDFs, which show nothing about “whether or when they were read,” Perry wrote.

The PDFs leave Perry without the evidence she sought to test U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ claim that he did not read the grand jury transcript attached to the October 2025 email.

“The Court notes that while production was optional under the Court’s order, the form of production was not,” Perry wrote.

Perry is investigating whether Boutros and other prosecutors made “willful false statements” to her, including about when he learned of misconduct before the grand jury.

The transcript records an Oct. 9, 2025, session in the case against the “Broadview Six,” protesters at an immigration facility in suburban Broadview. In it, a prosecutor vouched for the charges, putting her own credibility behind them, Perry wrote in a Nov. 2 order.

Boutros told Perry on May 21 that he was “completely unaware of any vouching that took place in the grand jury” until late April 2026.

But he had received the transcript on Oct. 14, 2025, five days after the session, and held it for more than seven months before making that statement, Perry wrote. He told her in August that he was “quite certain he did not review the transcript at that time.”

Perry called his statements “hard to credit.”

“The Government’s chosen manner of production thus sheds no light on the only relevant issue,” she wrote Tuesday.

Perry also faulted the department’s privilege log, a list of withheld records, which Woodward’s letter said covers communications with people outside the Chicago office.

She wrote that the log names no author or recipient and offers a single entry for “email exchange[s].” She called it “noncompliant” and “inadequate to establish any claims of privilege.”

But in a March 30 filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan told Perry there were “no communications of any nature” with anyone outside the office about investigatory or charging decisions, apart from local FBI investigators. He called the former defendants’ belief that “external political influence” led to the charges “completely false.”

“To be crystal clear, this specifically includes anyone in the White House and all components and offices of Main Justice,” Hogan wrote, referring to department headquarters.

“[T]here’s nothing. No way, no how,” Perry said at an Oct. 1 hearing, recalling what she had been told. “And now, your argument has changed pretty significantly, and is ‘well, if there was something, it would be privileged.’”

“I don’t believe I said ‘there’s no way, no how communications,’” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathaniel Whalen replied.

“You didn’t,” Perry said, emphasizing that the claim came from the prosecutors who handled the case.

The department has gone from telling Perry that no such outside communications existed to claiming privilege over them without naming who took part.

A September correction from the government acknowledged contact with department headquarters after the charging decision but said there had been none with the White House about the case. None of the department’s filings this week repeats that denial.

Perry said the department could submit a revised production by 3 p.m. Thursday “if these deficiencies were inadvertent.”

Boutros, Hogan and two other prosecutors are set to testify under oath before Perry on Nov. 16, in an inquiry she has said could lead to sanctions or criminal contempt, a charge for obstructing a court.

Woodward’s office asked Perry on Tuesday to explain what law authorizes that hearing.