Grand juries are the heart of the criminal justice system, the inner sanctum where prosecutors, working unchecked and in secret, have enormous power to indict their fellow citizens.
But under President Trump, the Justice Department has had serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries, running into problems that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago.
In the past several months, prosecutors have repeatedly failed to persuade grand juries that the cases they have brought warrant criminal charges. And if it were not unusual enough, they have also been admonished at least three times since last November by federal judges who have accused them of misconduct.
The latest setback came in Chicago, where a judge cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors as her reason for dismissing charges against four Democratic activists about to face trial for impeding the police during a protest last fall at a suburban immigration detention facility.
The blunders shocked the judge, April M. Perry, who recounted from the bench on Thursday how prosecutors had spoken to grand jurors outside the grand jury room — a major breach of protocol — and had improperly coached them that the evidence they had presented was particularly strong.
The prosecutors also stacked the deck in their own favor by removing from the panel some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges. Making matters even worse, they tried to hide these maneuvers by redacting the grand jury transcripts — that is, until Judge Perry ordered them to give her the full copies.
The government’s missteps were bad enough to necessitate tossing out the case against the critics of the president’s immigration plan just days before it was supposed to go to trial.
But the mistakes also pointed to a more important problem: As Mr. Trump has demanded more and more charges against those he perceives as his opponents, prosecutors have felt pressure to push weak cases through grand juries. And that, in turn, has led to an erosion in faith in the Justice Department by both the grand jurors themselves and the judges considering the cases.
“Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Judge Perry told Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who appeared in court to apologize for his subordinates’ mistakes. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing. That trust has been broken.”
Natalie Baldassare, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said that the Chicago case and the handful of others in which prosecutors have been scolded for their grand jury presentations were an anomaly.
“These few cases are not representative of D.O.J.’s overall achievements to date,” Ms. Baldassare said, “and we will not be deterred in our efforts to hold criminals accountable and keep the American people safe.”
There are almost no statistics that gauge how often prosecutors fail to secure indictments or are chastised by judges because of their grand jury presentations, if only because such events used to be rare. Legal experts say it is just as uncommon for jurists like Judge Perry to shine a spotlight on grand jury proceedings, which are held in secret, although that, too, has been happening more often.
Barbara L. McQuade, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said that in her 20 years in the Justice Department, she had never worked on a case — or even heard of one — in which a judge had examined grand jury transcripts because of concerns about misconduct.
“Courts almost never do that, mostly because they trust that the government is acting honestly,” Ms. McQuade said. “But if the department demonstrates that it isn’t worthy of that trust, then it invites judges to look under the hood.”
That is precisely what happened in Wyoming in recent weeks, when a panel of three federal judges threw out nine indictments — including some for murder — after an examination of the grand jury proceedings revealed misconduct by Darin Smith, the state’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney.
The judges ruled that Mr. Smith, who was in his first prosecutorial post after serving as a state senator and executive at the Christian Broadcasting Network, had addressed a panel of grand jurors at the federal courthouse in Casper on March 16. In remarks that broke with prosecutors’ typical nuance and restraint, he told the grand jurors that they were about to hear evidence concerning “bad guys” and “murderers” who “did what you are going to hear about.”
He added, for good measure, that the last grand jury to have sat in the courthouse returned an indictment in only three minutes.
Things got even stranger, the judges found, after the grand jurors had started hearing evidence. During a break in the presentation, Mr. Smith returned to the grand jury room, handed out his business cards to members of the panel and invited them to reach out to him, the judges said.
In the end, a new grand jury — one that Mr. Smith had never spoken to — recharged the cases that had been thrown out. But such behavior could have easily resulted in a U.S. attorney stepping down or being fired. Instead, the Senate confirmed Mr. Smith’s nomination on May 18, just three days after the judges issued their ruling dismissing the cases and exposing his transgressions.
Part of the problem, legal experts say, is that Mr. Trump has hired inexperienced loyalists to fill senior roles in the Justice Department even as hundreds of career prosecutors have departed — either by their own choice or because they were forced out for having worked on cases that ran afoul of the president.
Junior prosecutors typically attend a weeklong course on the ins and outs of working with grand juries, and often trail more seasoned colleagues before they take the lead in presenting cases. But leaders in politically appointed posts do not get the same kind or amount of training.
In many ways, the troubles in Chicago and Wyoming recall those that unfolded last September during the first criminal case brought against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director. That indictment was secured by Lindsey Halligan, a onetime insurance lawyer who was put in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, after her predecessor was fired for refusing to file charges against Mr. Comey.
Mr. Comey’s lawyers immediately tried to get their hands on the grand jury transcripts, suspecting misconduct after Ms. Halligan, who had never presented a case to a grand jury, went into the room alone on only her fourth day on the job. Ultimately, a magistrate judge, William E. Fitzpatrick, looked at the transcripts and issued a scathing ruling, finding that Ms. Halligan had made a series of mistakes and misrepresented basic aspects of the law.
A few days later, Ms. Halligan was hauled into court to flesh out the details of her grand jury presentation. Under grilling by a different judge, she made an astonishing admission: She had never shown the full grand jury the final version of the indictment it was supposed to have approved.
All of these examples of grand jury malfeasance come on top of the many cases in which Justice Department prosecutors have failed to get grand jurors to return indictments. Such failures — known as no true bills — used to be essentially unheard-of, given the amount of sway that prosecutors have in the grand jury room and the department’s adherence to a tradition of seeking charges only in cases with strong evidence.
But over the past year or so, there has been a flurry of no true bills in federal courts across the country. Most have occurred in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, where grand jurors have rejected several cases involving people accused of protesting the administration’s immigration crackdowns and surges in federal law enforcement.
Other high-profile failures have involved grand juries hearing cases against Mr. Trump’s political foes — among them, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, and the six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video reminding military and intelligence personnel of their obligation to disobey illegal orders.
The dismissed case in Chicago was unusual for having suffered a no true bill and, after an indictment was finally returned, other forms of flagrant misconduct.
Judge Perry said she was “incredibly shocked,” for instance, by the redactions that prosecutors had made to the grand jury transcripts. But she appeared to be just as stunned when she saw the full version.
“I have read hundreds, if not thousands, of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury,” she said. “I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
