It’s been nearly 30 years since Chicago federal prosecutor William Hogan won his old job back, returning to the city where he’d orchestrated the takedown of the infamous El Rukn street gang, only to be fired amid accusations that his cooperating witnesses had used drugs in jail, stolen sensitive prosecution papers and had sex in government offices.
In Hogan’s lengthy fight to clear his name, hearings played out like a soap-opera script, with testimony about conjugal visits, buried memos, even a legal aide’s lust for a gang kingpin. “This case has everything,” the merit board judge deciding Hogan’s fate once quipped.
It was a battle that left just about everyone with a black eye, but Hogan eventually won. Even though three federal district judges had overturned El Rukn convictions due to Hogan’s alleged misconduct, the administrative judge overruled his firing, saying the Justice Department failed to prove any wrongdoing on his part. Hogan’s story became one of redemption.
“I have never lost a moment’s sleep in the last six years questioning my conduct or whether I did anything illegal, unethical or improper,” Hogan told The Associated Press in 1998, shortly after resuming his post at 219 S. Dearborn St.
But fast-forward some 28 years, and Hogan, who’d largely faded from public view, is once again the subject of controversy at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
This time, he has come under fire for his actions in the “Broadview Six” case against Operation Midway Blitz protesters that dissolved in spectacular fashion in May amid allegations of prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury.
While Hogan, 75, didn’t present the case for indictment, he has taken responsibility for redacting large portions of the grand jury transcript that was initially handed up to the judge for review, leading to allegations by defense attorneys of an intentional cover-up.
More recently, Hogan’s name surfaced on a subpoena issued by U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros’ office last year targeting a Chicago-based Democratic fundraising firm once co-owned by the daughter of the judge in President Donald Trump’s 2024 hush-money trial in New York.
The subpoena, which was first reported by The New York Times and has been reviewed by the Tribune, was obtained through a special grand jury on Aug. 20, 2025, a time of massive upheaval within the Justice Department that had prompted many other senior prosecutors to leave the U.S. attorney’s office.
The broad demand largely parroted a criminal referral to the Justice Department by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in April 2025, after Mike Nellis, the founder of Authentic Campaigns, refused to comply with the committee’s request for records.
The grand jury request, which has since been the subject of extensive behind-the-scenes litigation, sought records and communications between Authentic Campaigns Inc. and a host of high-profile Democrats, including former Vice President Kamala Harris and Illinois U.S. Rep. Lauren Underwood.
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Underwood’s congressional office referred questions to her campaign, which did not respond to a request for comment Friday.
The U.S. attorney’s office has so far not commented on the subpoena or said whether there is an active investigation into the matter.
But critics have blasted it as another example of an abuse of power by the Justice Department to harass the president’s political adversaries.
“It’s a shame that guys like Trump and Hogan have destroyed the reputation of the Department of Justice by abusing their power to harass private citizens,” Nellis told the Tribune last week.
Meanwhile, in a recent court filing in the Broadview case, Boutros’ office referred to Hogan, a 40-year veteran, as “Experienced AUSA 2” and explained he could have handled the redactions differently.
For some longtimers in the Chicago legal community, the controversy swirling around Hogan is deja vu all over again.
One former assistant U.S. attorney who has been friends with Hogan for decades said it appeared his own office was once again throwing him under the bus. Others see parallels in Hogan’s strongheadedness landing him in hot water with a federal judge yet again.
“I would think that people learn from their mistakes, but sometimes they don’t,” defense attorney Richard Kling, who represented a reputed El Rukn drug courier whose convictions were overturned due to Hogan’s alleged improprieties.
El Rukn case
Hogan, who joined the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office in 1985, is the longest-tenured federal prosecutor in Chicago and widely known as a smart lawyer and staunch defender of the virtues of the office. He also has a well-earned reputation for saltiness in and out of the courtroom — which many have described as arrogance — that still shows even three decades after the El Rukn cases.
Despite the salacious allegations against him back then, Hogan had supporters in the office and legal community who praised him as a tenacious and principled prosecutor who made it his mission to rid Chicago of one of the most murderous criminal organizations the city had ever seen.
In 1990, shortly after indictments were announced against more than 60 El Rukn members and associates, a triumphant Hogan posed for photos as bulldozers razed the gang’s infamous “fort,” a converted movie theater at 39th and Drexel.
Hogan’s professional downfall — and the reversal of many of the convictions he’d fought so hard to secure — was alternately described as a crisis of his own making and an unfair attack on his character by judges who were displeased with his combative, win-at-all-costs attitude in court.
Most prominent were Hogan’s battles with U.S. District Judge James Holderman, who, after a weekslong hearing into wrongdoing by Hogan and his office, ultimately ordered new trials for several El Rukn defendants, finding Hogan had engaged in extensive prosecutorial misconduct, lied on the witness stand and turned a blind eye to rampant drug use by his own informants.
“The prosecutorial misconduct revealed by the post-trial evidence is disturbing,” Holderman wrote in his opinion in June 1993. “It certainly does not reflect the manner in which the vast majority of the employees of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago perform their duties.”
After his firing by the Justice Department, Hogan hit back with a point-by-point response at the merit board, denying any knowledge of the transgressions. He called dozens of witnesses in his own defense and was profiled in local and national news outlets. In one interview with the Tribune, he described how his early mentors in the U.S. attorney’s office gave him the backbone to do his job without fear of any political blowback.
“They were people who believed strongly in public service, in doing justice,” he said in 1994. “You could do this job and not worry about who you were prosecuting, what political power they had, whose political nose would be out of joint.”
Four years later, when a merit board judge finally cleared him in an exhaustive, 200-page opinion, Hogan got the news while crewing on a sailboat in Spain. He later held a news conference criticizing the Justice Department, saying it was “scared” to buck the findings of the district court against him.
“Rather than taking the politically unpalatable step of specifically contradicting those judges and sending me back up into those courtrooms, they took the easy way out, and they dumped me out the door,” Hogan said at the time.
Midway Blitz
Hogan had largely faded from the headlines since his reinstatement, continuing to prosecute mostly white-collar and financial crimes and winning his fair share of jury trials.
Then came Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s controversial immigration enforcement action last year, which prompted weeks of protests and clashes on the city’s streets, leading to dozens of people being charged in U.S. District Court with offenses such as assaulting or impeding federal agents.
As the wildly unpopular deportation operation continued, the cases Boutros’ office charged soon began to fall apart in court. Grand juries refused to indict several cases — a virtually unheard of occurrence. Prosecutors reduced some to misdemeanors, and dismissed others when evidence came to light that directly contradicted what agents had alleged happened.
Hogan personally handled one such case. Cole Sheridan, an Oak Park man, was accused of shoving Border Control Cmdr. Gregory Bovino in the back during a protest at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview on Oct. 3. As that case was prepared to go before the grand jury, Hogan asked for an extension to file an indictment so prosecutors could continue to investigate, Hogan told the Tribune in an interview last fall.
During that time, they found someone had a camera “behind the lines who caught the entire incident on video and demonstrated to us the kid was innocent,” Hogan said. He filed a motion to drop the case Nov. 3 — exactly one month after the incident.
At the time, Hogan said the Sheridan case showed the U.S. attorney’s office doing its job correctly.
But judges were starting to take notice. In a blistering opinion granting dismissal of charges against another Midway Blitz protester, U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes wrote that he could not “help but note just how unusual and possibly unprecedented it is” for Chicago’s venerable U.S. attorney’s office to bring charges “so hastily” that they would have to dismiss them once more facts came out.
“Any responsible federal prosecutor knows that federal charges, or any actions by the United States Attorney directed at the citizenry, must be undertaken with the utmost care,” Fuentes wrote.
The opinion was cheered by many, including, quietly, by some prosecutors in Boutros’ office. Others, like Hogan, thought Fuentes was way out over his skis.
“Who does he think he is, grandstanding like that?” Hogan told the Tribune in November, a rebuke of a judge that some at the courthouse found startling. “I have never in 45 years read an opinion remotely like that. It is shocking.”
Broadview Six flap
Of all the cases coming out of Midway Blitz, it was the Broadview Six matter that would prove to be the most controversial.
The initial indictment charged each of the defendants, most of whom had ties to local Democratic politics, with a count of felony conspiracy alleging they surrounded an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle in an attempt to impede the agent from performing his duties.
Hogan didn’t take over the politically charged case until months later, after the original prosecutor, Sheri Mecklenburg, left the office for an assignment in Washington, D.C. Soon after, as the defense continued to clamor for U.S. District Judge April Perry to review grand jury transcripts in the case, Hogan dropped a bombshell: His office was dismissing the main conspiracy charge and intended to proceed instead with misdemeanor counts.
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The move, Hogan told the judge, would render the defense’s continued requests for her to review unredacted grand jury transcripts “moot.”
Perry agreed, and after some discussion about next steps, Hogan asked her: “Do you still want us to furnish the unredacted versions or should we wait?”
“Let’s wait,” Perry responded.
Trial on the misdemeanor counts was set for late May, but meanwhile, defense attorney Christopher Parente continued to push for Perry to review the entire grand jury record, particularly portions where the panel was instructed on the law.
A day before a hearing on that matter, Hogan emailed the judge’s clerk asking if prosecutors still needed to appear since, in his office’s view, the issue was mooted by the dismissal of the indictment.
In discussing the matter in court on May 7, Perry said she was under the impression the U.S. attorney’s office had blacked out only a few lines of the transcript.
In fact, prosecutors had turned over heavily redacted transcripts that blacked out about 80 pages over three days of testimony. Neither Hogan nor anyone else on the prosecution team did anything to correct the judge’s misunderstanding.
On May 18, Perry held a final pretrial conference to go over logistics ahead of the trial and Parente again raised the grand jury issue. Finally, Perry agreed to take a look at the unredacted copies, but again said, “I want to say there were like 15 lines redacted. If I had to guess, it seems like those were probably related to IT issues playing the video, but I couldn’t tell and that’s why I asked for it.”
Hogan did not object, saying, “We offered that weeks ago.”
Two days after being handed the full transcripts, Perry revealed that there had been what she deemed was shocking misconduct by Mecklenburg in front of the grand jury, including improperly “vouching” for the strength of the evidence, telling grand jurors who were skeptical that they should leave, and having “ex-parte” communications with some jurors before finally securing an indictment.
But as disappointing as Mecklenburg’s actions were, Perry said she found the apparent attempts to hide them from her even more egregious.
When asked who was responsible, Hogan said, “Mostly me. I’ll take responsibility for it.”
Hours later, Boutros appeared in open court to dismiss the case entirely. In doing so, he defended the trial team, saying they believed the judge had asked for only the portion of the grand jury transcript where jurors were instructed on the law, also known as the session “minutes.”
“I truly do believe that all of these prosecutors here, no one acted with the intent to mislead your honor,” Boutros said.