Chicago's storied U.S. attorney's office at crossroads as indictments dip, search for leader underway

Chicago Tribune

10-03-2025

The search for Chicago's 42nd U.S. attorney comes at a significant moment in history for an office long extolled as a model for the nation.
After two years without a Senate-confirmed top federal prosecutor, the office has seen its productivity go into free fall, putting it behind much smaller outposts such as Rhode Island and even tiny Guam when it comes to key metrics kept by the district courts, records show.
Through the turmoil of changing administrations and a global pandemic, scores of veteran prosecutors fled for private practice or judgeships, leaving large gaps in leadership. Morale has dipped amid a variety of issues, sources told the Tribune, including COVID-era hybrid work schedules that limited face-to-face time, a focus on one-off gun cases, and now a federal hiring freeze.
The bleeding continued last week, with the announcement that Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu, the veteran boss of the Public Corruption and Organized Crime Section who led the prosecution of ex-House Speaker Michael Madigan, is leaving Friday.
Now, an emboldened President Donald Trump is keeping good on his promise to remake the U.S. Justice Department, selecting loyalists Pam Bondi as attorney general and Kash Patel as FBI director and dramatically shifting priorities away from some of the more traditional investigative targets in Illinois.
Other moves, such as the attempt to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, which led to mass resignations in New York and Washington, have had ripple effects in Chicago as well, putting many, especially younger line attorneys, on edge. On Friday, two federal prosecutors in Manhattan who worked on the Adams case were placed on leave and escorted out of the building by federal law enforcement, according to multiple news reports.
The galvanizing issues have caught the attention of Chicago's legal community, with judges, lawyers and court watchers wondering: Is the U.S. attorney's office in crisis?
Maybe not. But it is certainly at a crossroads.
'This office for decades was one of the most productive in the country, and for it to be dead last in key metrics is shocking and embarrassing,' one former federal prosecutor and current criminal defense attorney, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Tribune. 'Given the steep decline, the selection of the next U.S. attorney in Chicago takes on even greater significance.'
Seeking leadership
That search for a new boss is now officially underway.
Last month, U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, a Peoria Republican, announced he was leading the process to find potential nominees to give to Trump, whose ultimate selection for the job would then go through a confirmation process in the U.S. Senate.
In making his announcement, LaHood, a former state and federal prosecutor, noted the office's recent slump. He also said it will be critically important to select a top prosecutor who will follow Trump administration priorities on 'implementing and enforcing our immigration laws' and fighting 'rampant and rising criminal activity in Chicago.'
That shift in direction has many in Chicago legal circles wondering if Chicago's next top federal prosecutor will have the same leeway as his predecessors.
'The directive from the Department of Justice has been to roll back white-collar investigations and focus on immigration and drug trafficking,' said Damon Cheronis, a criminal defense attorney and federal court veteran. 'Clearly, those will be the marching orders for the next U.S. attorney here.'
The president hinted as much in his address last week to a joint session of Congress, saying the 'justice system has been turned upside down by radical left lunatics.'
'Many jurisdictions virtually ceased enforcing the law against dangerous repeat offenders while weaponizing law enforcement against political opponents, like me,' Trump said.
The shift isn't just confined to the current White House. The U.S. Supreme Court has for years been cooling on federal fraud prosecutions, issuing a series of rulings curtailing the use of honest service and bribery statutes to go after corruption.
In December, conservative Justice Samuel Alito left some in Chicago's legal community scratching their heads when he said during oral arguments in a fraud case that 'the court really doesn't like the federalization of white-collar prosecutions' and wants to see them 'done in state court and is really hostile to this whole enterprise.'
It's also not lost on anyone in Chicago's legal community that the biggest reason the city has been without a permanent leader in the U.S. attorney's office since 2023 is because then-Sen. JD Vance, now the vice president, blocked the Biden administration's nominee as part of a political protest.
Regardless of any change in mission, many attorneys who spoke to the Tribune about the issue said the next U.S. attorney will need to be someone with a deep institutional knowledge of the office who can fire up the troops.
'They need to find someone who will earn the respect of the people in that office, all the line assistants,' said Joseph Lopez, a Chicago attorney who has been defending cases at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse since the mid-1980s. 'A hands-on administrator, checking up on what you're doing … coming down and watching trials.'
Some within the office, however, said that while new leadership will energize the office, the attitude among the rank-and-file has largely been business as usual — despite all the distractions.
'It has not slowed us down,' said one veteran assistant U.S. attorney who asked not to be named. 'We believe in the mission. People are still really busy, and they really care.'
Drop in indictments
For years, the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago, which currently has a $35 million annual budget and about 140 prosecutors and hundreds more support staff members, was one of the most productive in the country, both in the high-profile cases it brought against politicians, terrorists, gang leaders and corporate thieves, as well as in the sheer number of indictments.
At its zenith under former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who was once described by a colleague as 'Eliot Ness with a Harvard degree,' the office was filing more than seven indictments per prosecutor per year, or some 1,000 annually, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. District Courts.
Another metric often used by the courts counts the number of newly indicted defendants each year divided by the number of active judgeships — not sitting judges — in the district. By that score, too, Chicago was near the top every year, according to the statistics.
Some of that productivity was simply a sign of the times. Street gangs were more organized and focused on drug trafficking, which led to many takedowns where dozens of defendants would be charged, pumping up the number of prosecutions. Fitzgerald also stressed the Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative, which led to many cases filed against felons caught carrying guns.
The numbers held steady immediately after Fitzgerald's departure in 2012 but then began to decline slowly, first under U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon and later under his successor, John Lausch, who was nominated in 2017 during Trump's first term, the data shows.
In 2019, the second full year of Lausch's term, the U.S. attorney's office filed 39 indictments per judgeship, down about 16% from Fitzgerald's top years, records show. The number continued to decline as the COVID-19 pandemic set in, virtually closing the courthouse and leading to a slow recovery of in-person proceedings. In 2020, there were 38 indictments per judge, the records show. In 2021, as the pandemic continued to disrupt the courts, it fell again to 31.
But once operations were back to normal, the numbers did not improve. In fact, in both 2022 and 2023, there were only 23 indictments per judgeship. And in 2024, it hit rock bottom at 19.
That figure puts the Chicago office dead last among the 94 federal court districts in the country — lower than Rhode Island, which saw 33 indictments per judge filed in 2024, ranking it 85th, and Guam, the U.S. Pacific island territory with just one sitting judge, which is ranked 68th.
The only districts even close to that bad in 2024 were Hawaii, which has only four judges, and the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which is comparable in size to Chicago's office and landed 21 indictments per judge, the data shows.
A slower court path
The Northern District of Illinois also ranked dead last in 2024 in another important stat: the average length of time it takes a criminal case to get to a disposition — be it a guilty plea or trial.
In Chicago, that figure stood at 33.3 months, more than double what it was just five years ago, the district court records show. The records show the national median time for a case to be adjudicated is just under 11 months.
Certainly, the length of time cases drag on can't be blamed on the U.S. attorney's office alone. Several attorneys who spoke to the Tribune said litigation here tends to be more complex and often gets bogged down in electronic discovery that takes months to sift through, leading to agreed continuances. There is a more robust defense bar, leading to more pretrial motions. Also, judges here also are often inundated with filings in their civil cases — which Chicago still ranks near the top in the nation — and trial schedules can be hard to manage.
In a statement to the Tribune, U.S. District Chief Judge Virginia Kendall said judges are constantly juggling their responsibilities for 'active and timely case management' with the needs of the attorneys and defendants.
'Due to the complexity of the cases in our court, it is common for defense attorneys and the United States attorney's office to jointly request extensions of time to review the voluminous evidence and prepare their case,' Kendall wrote. '… If a defendant and defense attorney were to request a speedy trial under the Act with no exclusions, our judges will provide that trial.'
Kendall also noted the Northern District of Illinois is one of the busiest federal districts in the country, and judges here 'routinely try multi-defendant cases that last over weeks or even months.'
'The statistics do not fully take account of the complexity of criminal cases typically brought in a district of our size,' Kendall wrote, adding that the median disposition time here compares with districts of similar size and in major metropolitan areas, including Philadelphia and Brooklyn, New York.
The records show criminal cases in the federal courthouse in Brooklyn indeed took a median of 29.8 months to be adjudicated in 2024, just three and a half months better than Chicago. Philadelphia came in at 20.5 months, the records show.
In limbo despite big cases
In some ways, the data showing the marked slowdown in prosecutions does not seem to match what the public sees day to day.
That's largely due to a series of far-ranging, high-profile public corruption cases that ensnared more than a dozen elected officials, from state legislators and suburban mayors to two of the all-time Democratic heavyweights of the state, ex-Speaker Madigan and former Ald. Edward Burke.
But as those cases were unfolding in the news, so was the intrigue in who would continue to lead the U.S. attorney's office.
Lausch, a veteran prosecutor from Joliet, was nominated by Trump in 2017 and held the post during the early portion of the Biden administration due to a bipartisan call to keep him on as those very political corruption investigations moved forward.
Lausch officially stepped down March 11, 2023, days before the 'ComEd Four' case alleging a scheme by the utility giant to bribe Madigan went to trial. Lausch's departure put his deputy, longtime Assistant U.S. Attorney Morris 'Sonny' Pasqual, in charge as acting U.S. attorney — a position that's supposed to last only a few months until a new boss is nominated and confirmed.
Meanwhile, April Perry, a former federal prosecutor, was nominated by President Joe Biden to succeed Lausch as the first woman to ever hold the office. And though Perry was confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2023, she never was confirmed by a full vote in the Senate.
That's because of a blanket hold put on all U.S. attorney nominees by Vance, of Ohio, who said he held up final votes on the Senate floor to protest the U.S. Justice Department's criminal investigations of Trump.
Perry's nomination was eventually pulled and she was instead selected to be a U.S. District Court judge in Chicago, a role she began last year.
Most of the lawyers who spoke to the Tribune said Pasqual, a 33-year veteran of the U.S. attorney's office who was the chief of the Narcotics and Gang Section before becoming Lausch's top assistant, has done an adequate job acting boss, holding the office together under unusual circumstances while the political drama played out.
But the job of an acting U.S. attorney is, by design, a placeholder, not someone tasked to bring vision to the office or dictate new policy. And it's certainly not a role that should last two years or more.
'He's the assistant coach who came off the bench,' Lopez said. 'He really can't start any new game plans. He's been in limbo as much as the entire office.'
A spokesman for Pasqual declined to comment on the office's productivity or the leadership search.
Meanwhile, several sources have told the Tribune that a number of former Chicago federal prosecutors are already being considered as part of LaHood's ongoing search.
Among them: Andrew Boutros, now the co-chair of the government investigations and white-collar group at Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP; Jeffrey Cramer, senior litigation counsel at the Department of Justice; Paul Tzur, now a partner at Blank Rome LLP; and Mark Schneider, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis.
Ultimately, Trump is under no obligation to pick a nominee turned up in LaHood's search. But so far, lawyers who spoke to the Tribune said they're happy the list includes candidates who know what makes Chicago's U.S. attorney's office tick.
'I am pleased that the names reported so far as being under consideration are well-acquainted with the storied history of the office,' a veteran criminal defense attorney said.