There are several truths worth acknowledging about the current state of the so-called Department of Justice. Donald Trump has weaponized the DOJ to attack political enemies, real and perceived. In general, Trump has abused government power in ways that are arguably unique, and inarguably terrible and worse than his modern predecessors. And also, this weaponization is possible only because the underlying systems of American prosecution were already weaponized against huge swathes of the country.

People across the anti-authoritarian universe tend to agree on the first two truths. The third, when named, strikes many proponents of American democracy as blasphemous. Justice, after all, is in the name of the Department. Surely the current moment is a dramatic deviation from how things usually function!

It isn’t. It’s an escalation; it’s a deviation in terms of who is swept up in prosecutorial misconduct’s net; it is not a major change to the underlying system. That wouldn’t even really make sense. Massive arms of the federal government don’t change dramatically overnight, or even in the span of a year and a half. The president’s abuse of the DOJ is only possible because of the deep culture of prioritizing convictions over justice (even though it’s in the name!) that permeates our country’s adversarial legal system.

Problems must be acknowledged to be fixed. We cannot acknowledge them, not really, while pretending they are anything other than the result of a system doing what it did already, just to lower-profile people. As a case study, let’s revisit the story of Chicago’s Broadview Six.

In October 2025, one month after protesters gathered outside an ICE facility in Broadview (a suburban village west of the city), six of the activists were federally indicted on both misdemeanor and felony charges. The facility is not a detention center but was being used as one, in violation of state law. The people detained there have reported truly horrifying treatment.

The government’s indictment was based on protesters “blocking” an ICE vehicle that had literally driven into them while a crowd was participating in a Jericho walk across a side street used to access the facility, creating an unbroken circle of marchers across the crosswalk to avoid arrest for blocking the street. Prosecutors alleged that the defendants “banged aggressively” on the car, then joined together and “pushed against the vehicle to hinder and impede its movement.” When the crowd cleared, according to the filing, the car’s side mirror and rearview window were broken and someone had etched “PIG” into the paint—though none of the defendants were specifically accused of causing damage.

There were dozens of protesters present, and only six indicted. All six had connections to the Democratic Party, except for Joselyn Walsh, a musician who left the protest early, she says, after an ICE agent shot a “less lethal” round through her guitar. One of the Broadview Six was Kat Abughazaleh, a high-profile congressional candidate whose pre-campaign career included reporting on the far right for Media Matters.

The federal indictments came amid many others filed against anti-ICE protestors and, occasionally with overlap, the president’s political adversaries. The government struggled to obtain convictions in these cases. By August 10, 2026, the federal government had charged 33 Chicago-area residents with non-immigration crimes connected to protest. Twenty-five of them had already been cleared, and only two defendants pleaded guilty.

Charges were also dropped in numerous other high-profile protest cases, including those against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and labor leader David Huerta, while Congressman-elect Brad Lander was acquitted on misdemeanor charges related to an arrest in immigration court.

The government even struggled to obtain indictments, incredibly uncommon because the government gets to do so in one-sided grand jury proceedings where only the prosecutors are present. Grand juries refused to indict at least three of those Chicago-area protestors. A grand jury also refused to indict the protester Sean Dunn, who famously threw a sandwich at an immigration officer in Washington, D.C., on felony charges. A jury subsequently acquitted him on misdemeanor charges at trial.

The Broadview case eventually collapsed too. In March 2026, the charges against Walsh and one other protestor, Cat Sharp, were dropped. In April, all of the felony charges disappeared. And in late May, after Judge April Perry finally read the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—something the defense initially moved to request at the beginning of April—the government dismissed all remaining charges days before the scheduled trial.

The transcripts have since been unsealed, a rarity, and reveal that the DOJ initially failed to obtain an indictment at all. They can just keep going, and they did, finally obtaining their indictment after dismissing a juror who called the case “a crock of shit.”

Judge Perry declared the misconduct shocking. Coverage framed the behavior as exceptionally bad, indicative of Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice.

The attorney who eventually obtained the successful indictment is a woman named Sheri Mecklenburg. She has worked at the DOJ for almost 20 years. Her misconduct in grand juries, now under a microscope, has already led to the dismissal of two other cases. Those cases have nothing to do with Trump’s political aims. The higher profile case—which is one of the higher profile cases to come from the Northern District of Illinois—is a fraud case against former executives at Loretto Hospital.

The Broadview charges upended the lives of all six defendants. They accrued huge legal bills, and faced years in prison. Abughazaleh was running a Congressional campaign, one she lost very narrowly following months of both running for office and also fighting the federal government in court. Do not mistake me saying this playbook is largely unexceptional for saying it was tolerable.

Criminal indictments are hugely burdensome, scary, and disruptive, regardless of outcome, every single time they happen. They mostly happen to poor people.

In criminal cases, judges ascribe a “presumption of regularity” to the actions of the government, functionally assuming good faith unless presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There are multiple problems with this approach, not least of which being that defendants don’t know what they don’t know, and often need judges to rule to grant them access to the evidence that would overcome the presumption of regularity—which judges are often unwilling to do because of the presumption of regularity.

What happened to the Broadview defendants was actually well within regularity. One common element of the DOJ’s playbook in the case was its decision to charge several people who were barely involved in the alleged conduct at all. This tactic is used in the hopes that the government can get those defendants to testify against everyone else, in exchange for dismissed charges or a plea to a lesser offense. In Chicago, nobody went for it.

In Spokane, protestors weren’t so lucky: after nine anti-ICE demonstrators were charged with federal felonies in June 2025, six of the defendants took plea deals. The remaining three were found guilty and convicted of conspiracy charges, almost certainly due to the cooperation of people who cut deals.

This is how the system works, always, for everyone. A super-supermajority—roughly 98 percent—of federal criminal cases end in plea bargains. There are arguments for and against plea bargaining, and some of those in favor are compelling, but it’s inarguable that the system incentivizes overcharging people.

To strike a bargain, a prosecutor has to have a lesser charge they can offer the defense. To do so, prosecutors indict people on whatever they can plausibly bring to a grand jury, even when they ultimately want a conviction on a lesser offense; basically, a “shoot for the moon and you’ll land among the stars” philosophy. If the defendant wants to go to trial, they may well face charges the prosecution never thought were really fitting in the first place, but were only brought to coerce testimony against an alleged co-conspirator, or to get the lesser conviction they actually wanted without a trial. And as Broadview has made abundantly clear, if the government wants an indictment, it can get one.

This abuse of prosecutorial power didn’t start with Trump. Consider what the Obama Administration did to Aaron Swartz.

In January of 2011, Swartz—a 24-year-old Harvard researcher and internet activist—was arrested on two state charges of “breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony,” after he entered MIT’s campus and downloaded millions of academic articles from JSTOR using the school’s network. (This, despite the fact that the university has an “open campus” and the door to the wiring closet where Swartz connected his computer was reportedly unlocked.)

Swartz returned the data, and JSTOR explicitly asked the government not to prosecute. Federal prosecutors went ahead anyway. They initially charged Swartz with four felony counts, carrying a potential maximum sentence of 35 years; another indictment later brought the total number of felony counts to 13.

Two years after his arrest, Swartz died by suicide in January 2013. Afterward, U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz defended the prosecution by pointing out that her office never intended to seek anything close to the maximum sentence the charges allowed. Prosecutors had offered to recommend six months of probation if Swartz pleaded guilty. This was presented as evidence that the government had acted reasonably.

But that is precisely the point: if six months was the punishment deemed appropriate for Swartz’s actions, why charge him with crimes carrying the potential for decades in prison? Because it acted as leverage.

The Broadview case offers another example through the felony for which the defendants were indicted: conspiracy to impede or injure an officer. This was the stick to get people to flip; they faced years in prison if convicted. It also could be filed against literally anyone at Broadview that day, because conspiracy does not require the act be completed, or that the plan be made in advance. The ability of the government to abuse the loose bounds of conspiracy to overcharge has been well-documented for decades, with legal scholar Albert Harno warning in 1941 that the crime held “serious potential dangers of abuse.”

And again, there is nothing uniquely Trumpian about prosecutors weaponizing conspiracy charges against people engaged in political activity. In 2022, President Biden’s DOJ charged four American citizens for failing to register as “agents of a foreign government,” alleging they had illegally spread “pro-Russian propaganda” in order to “cause dissension in the United States and to promote secessionist ideologies.” The defendants were all members of the African People’s Socialist Party and Uhuru Movement in St. Louis and St. Petersburg, Florida.

Prosecutors said that a Russian national named Aleksandr Ionov had secretly used the American political groups to sow discord inside the United States—and while the defendants did have a relationship with Ionov, who provided funding for some of their activities, they insisted that their political positions were their own, not instructions handed down from Moscow. The defendants were finally acquitted of acting as agents, but were found guilty of conspiring to defraud the U.S. government.

There’s a narrative that Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is stacked with loyalists, that he’s corrupted the DOJ, that the prosecutorial behavior in this grand jury was deeply abnormal. That narrative is based on nothing. Much like defendants and their attorneys, we don’t know what we don’t know, and grand juries are subject to precious little oversight. But the facts we can confirm about the current DOJ make it hard to believe the current culture is some massive deviation from the norm.

I took it upon myself to suffer through the broken links and typos that fill the Department of Justice’s website to confirm whether current leadership is as inexperienced and unqualified as liberal commenters tend to allege. There are 93 U.S. Attorney’s offices in the United States. Of the 93 people who were running them in mid-June, 81 were either state-level prosecutors or at the Department of Justice prior to their appointment.

Eighty-seven percent of the people running federal prosecutions right now, the ones who are supposedly exceptionally biased and bad and beyond the pale in terms of ethics and lawyerly code, are experienced prosecutors. Eighty-seven percent. Fully 72 percent of them were specifically prosecutors in a U.S. Attorney’s office.

The New York Times declares, “There’s No Escaping the Rot in This Justice Department.” I agree, but it’s largely staffed with the same people as it had been before. Which hypothesis is more likely: that they had totally different ethical codes about obtaining an indictment or conviction prior to January 20, 2025, or that they were just being pressured to obtain indictments and convictions against different people, as opposed to the President’s high-profile political enemies?

Roughly 38.5 percent of people in federal prison are Black despite Black Americans being roughly 13.7 percent of the United States population. One of the drivers of this disparity is the well-documented racial disparities at every level of the criminal legal system, including prosecutorial discretion in who gets indicted, what they get indicted with, and what plea deals they’re offered. The DOJ has always weaponized prosecutions against specific people the government either does not care about or actively wishes to punish. It’s just expanding the net now.

There’s no need to distinguish protest cases, even. In August 2021, the Movement for Black Lives and the CUNY School of Law released a report outlining the Department of Justice’s targeting of Black activists based on protest in the summer of 2020. While these prosecutions originated under the first Trump administration, President Biden did not direct the DOJ to drop the cases or grant clemency to protestors, even following media attention. The closest the BLM protestors got was a fake article widely shared on Facebook claiming Biden had pardoned them. He hadn’t.

I doubt the DOJ attorneys making these decisions think they’re doing anything racist. I also don’t think Sheri Mecklenburg thought she was doing anything wrong in her grand juries, because she was a model DOJ employee for almost 20 years leading up to the Broadview case.

Mecklenburg was a top performer in an office described by a University of Chicago professor who used to work there as one with “this reputation of really being very, very upstanding and really focused on the facts and the law and being apolitical in the way that they operate.” Mecklenburg definitely views herself as unbiased and apolitical, as most DOJ attorneys do. She withdrew from prosecuting the Broadview Six to accept a special assignment with the Senate Judiciary Committee, overseen by Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, a position she lost after the misconduct surfaced. She was a recipient of the Chicago Bar Association’s 2025 Frank J. McGarr Award for Distinguished Federal Government Service by a Government Attorney, the nonprofit Chicago Bar Foundation’s 2017 Richard J. Phelan Public Service Award, and served as the President of the Board of Directors for the Federal Bar Association’s Chicago Chapter.

She was also the General Counsel of the Chicago Police Department before she joined the DOJ.

Was Mecklenburg body-snatched when Donald Trump was sworn in last year? Was she the only prosecutor at this office who would have been willing to engage in unethical behavior to obtain an indictment, and staffed on this case by luck or coincidence? That’s hard to believe, since there were multiple prosecutors present during the grand jury proceedings, one of whom she literally said would “vouch” for her while promising she wouldn’t bring unsubstantiated charges to a grand jury. The name for improperly promising the grand jury can trust you, something very much not allowed, is “vouching.” It also strains credulity that the DOJ might have staffed poor performers on such high-profile cases.

Mecklenburg was staffed on these cases because she was a high-performing prosecutor. She was a high-performing prosecutor because of a disregard for just outcomes and a willingness to obtain indictments and convictions at all costs, not despite that disregard.

The Broadview transcripts show Mecklenburg was willing to keep pushing for an indictment after failing to obtain one the first time, being told by a grand juror the case was a “crock of shit,” and then dismissing that grand juror to finally be able to obtain said indictment. Presumably, she was willing to do this because her boss told her it was important to obtain an indictment. Do we really think someone who was unwilling to walk away from the job in those circumstances is prioritizing anything other than doing what she’s told, and obtaining indictments and convictions in whatever cases are handed over? Here, again, we return to the racism endemic and demonstrable at every single decision point of our criminal legal system.

Many people have left the Department of Justice under Trump. The DOJ has lost 21 percent of its attorneys, down from 12,975 to 10,310, and across the entire federal system, comprising roughly 40,000-plus attorneys, the Trump administration has made about 3,200 hires. Undoubtedly, these handpicked replacements have the power to wield the justice system for political motives—but so did those who came before them. The large majority of the people in the Trump DOJ right now—from leadership all the way down—are the same people who were there before. They used to get different directives, ones that were still deeply harmful. Under President Obama, the DOJ pursued high-profile prosecutions against whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and routinely subpoenaed journalists in an attempt to get them to reveal sources. Obama’s DOJ allocated roughly 60 percent of its caseload to prosecuting drug or immigration offenses. The DOJ’s focus was not on protecting rights, prioritizing justice, or prosecuting violent crime then, either.

Bear in mind, too, that the vast majority of criminal cases happen in state courts, with even less oversight, brought by prosecutors who are generally viewed as less competent or qualified than those in federal court. Terrifyingly, they are sending their best people.

The story of the Broadview Six was framed as some horrifying abnormality. The DOJ is attempting to pin all culpability on Mecklenburg, to pretend the blame falls on one person instead of the system itself.

The reality is, this conduct came from an extremely well-regarded, experienced attorney within a respected office in the part of our court system subject to the most oversight, in a case that was certain, from the beginning, to be high-profile and fought by really good defense attorneys. There’s no way this was abnormally bad behavior. At best, this was standard practice. At worst, this was Mecklenburg being careful.

It’s not pleasant to watch the horrors of Trump 2.0 unfold, be horrified, and then be met with what can feel like a “well, actually” about how things have always been bad. Unfortunately, things have always been bad. Acknowledging that doesn’t minimize the import of the way bad things are worse now. But it isn’t just absurd to act as though prosecutorial misconduct was invented last year, in a country with a history of mostly racist and/or classist prosecutorial misconduct that has literally never abated. It’s disrespectful.

There’s a reason the Loretto defendants were the first to be able to get their cases dismissed based on Mecklenburg’s misconduct. They are rich. They have good defense attorneys. And now all of Mecklenburg’s recent indictments are called into question. What about all the ones before Trump? What about all the ones obtained by the prosecutors who watched her commit that misconduct and said nothing? What about all the ones obtained by the people tolerating and facilitating and leaning into the “rot” that corporate media is pretending sprung up overnight, among a bunch of people who had been doing this exact job before President Trump was a twinkle in a white supremacist’s eye?

The Atlantic has declared that the presumption of regularity—the good faith judges automatically ascribe to the government—is now evaporating. To the extent that’s true: it never should have existed in the first place, and it certainly should never have survived decades upon decades of statistics showing the racism that permeates our criminal legal system. But also, even among the judges who feel that way, this new suspicion of the government seems to only apply in cases that are arguably political prosecutions. There’s no consideration of what the prosecutorial misconduct in those cases tells us about the whole rotten system, no attention paid to the people it’s already gobbled up, no questioning of go-forward indictments for the vast majority of people charged with crimes, who are low-profile and whose actions are unrelated to protest.

Everyone is right to be outraged about the misconduct revealed in those grand jury transcripts, and they’re probably right to say that this kind of misconduct being used to obtain indictments against high-profile political opponents is new. But they are wrong to pretend the misconduct itself, including in protest cases, is anything but business as usual. And if they pretend the problems of Trump 2.0 can be solved without addressing the racism and cultural rot undergirding our criminal legal system, they set themselves, and the country, up to fail.