Veteran Chicago lawyer and former federal prosecutor Andrew Boutros was officially appointed Friday to serve as interim U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
The move is effective April 7 and was announced internally by the office of U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, according to Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago.
The interim appointment lasts 120 days or until a permanent replacement is nominated and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Fitzpatrick said.
The Department of Justice had not publicly announced Boutros’ appointment as of Friday afternoon.
The Tribune reported earlier this week that Boutros, 47, now the co-chair of the government investigations and white-collar group at Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP in Chicago, was among those vetted for the White House by U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, a Peoria Republican, who conducted several rounds of interviews over the past month.
Several sources familiar with the process told the Tribune that Boutros was not among those LaHood recommended for the position, however. According to the sources, LaHood instead forwarded the names of two other former assistant U.S. attorneys, Jeffrey Cramer and Mark Schneider, as well as Brendan O’Leary, an ex-Cook County prosecutor and FBI special agent who headed the public corruption squad in Chicago.
In a statement Friday evening, LaHood said the Trump administration “worked swiftly” to appoint an interim U.S. attorney to help an office that “plays a critical role in fighting crime and public corruption.”
LaHood said he’s “confident” the appointment of Boutros “will address rising crime rates, support enforcement of our immigration laws, fight public corruption, and restore faith in our justice system.”
Meanwhile, Illinois’ two Democratic U.S. senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, released a joint statement saying the White House has assured them they’d be consulted before any nomination for the permanent role of U.S. Attorney was made.
Durbin and Duckworth also pointed out that Chicago’s U.S. attorney slot has remained vacant for so long only because then-Sen. JD Vance, now vice president, held up the nomination of April Perry and other Biden nominees as a protest against the criminal investigations of Donald Trump.
Boutros is expected to inject new energy into an office that has long been considered one of the best in the country but has seen productivity slip in recent years.
Known as a diligent attorney and an extremely hard worker, Boutros is a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Egypt. He attended Virginia Tech University and earned his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2001.
Boutros spent eight years as a federal prosecutor under then-U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, bringing a number of high-profile and complex prosecutions involving everything from international trade to dark web narcotics conspiracy.
Chicago attorney Renato Mariotti, whose career in the U.S. attorney’s office largely overlapped with Boutros, said his former colleague is a solid selection who “understands the traditions of the office.”
“Andrew is a go-getter. He’s a grinder and he’s driven,” said Mariotti, now a partner at Paul Hastings LLP. “There are some people who float through life and everything is given to them. That is not Andrew Boutros.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago was long considered one of the busiest in the nation, handling everything from terrorism, gang conspiracies and bank robberies to financial fraud and political corruption. The office has more than 300 employees, including about 140 prosecutors.
The office has recently secured convictions in several major public corruption cases, including the trials of former Ald. Edward Burke and former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, two Democratic titans whose decades holding the reins of power culminated in separate guilty verdicts over the past year.
But while those high-profile cases have played out, the U.S. attorney’s office’s overall productivity has declined, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic virtually shut down the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in 2020 and parts of 2021, followed by an extended period without a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney at the helm.
The Tribune reported earlier this month that the office had sunk to dead last in the country in some key metrics in 2024, including the number of indictments filed per judgeship in the district.
The decline accelerated after John Lausch stepped down as Chicago’s top federal prosecutor in March 2023. Since then, Lausch’s former deputy, longtime prosecutor Morris “Sonny” Pasqual, has served as acting U.S. attorney.
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