A federal magistrate judge in Chicago has issued a bench ruling finding that the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois violated a sealing order in a US attorney sealing order dispute arising from the prosecution of alleged members of the Venezuelan transnational gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), stopping short of holding US Attorney Andrew Boutros in contempt.
US Magistrate Judge Laura McNally delivered the ruling at a hearing on 10 July 2026, during which Boutros stood before her for nearly half an hour while she told him there had been a clear violation of her sealing order, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
‘Thank God, no concrete harm came as a result of this violation,’ McNally said. ‘I’m going to be making no finding here that you acted with any nefarious purpose or that this was done in direct and open defiance of the court order.’
The US Attorney Sealing Order at Issue
The charges at the centre of the dispute were filed on 29 June. According to a DOJ Office of Public Affairs press release, three alleged TdA members were charged in the Northern District of Illinois with conspiring to kidnap and murder a man in Chicago. Across both the Northern Districts of Illinois and Texas, eight alleged TdA members in total faced charges covering murders, kidnappings, and firearms offences.
The case was subject to a sealing order obtained at the request of the line prosecutors working on it. That order became the source of the dispute when, on 1 July, Boutros appeared alongside Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel at a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce the charges publicly.
Prosecutors working the case had sought to lift the order before the press conference. Judge McNally, however, said they came to her fewer than 30 minutes before it began and represented that she needed to rule within 15 minutes. She was unable to do so, and declined to unseal the material. The press conference proceeded regardless.
One factor in the court’s refusal was the status of arrests. As McNally wrote earlier this month: ‘As of the date of the motion to unseal, less than 48 hours after the arrest warrants were issued, the Government represents that the defendants have not all been arrested. One defendant remains at large.’ Boutros told the judge at Thursday’s hearing that the outstanding arrest had since been made.
Boutros’s ‘Good Faith’ Defence and the Court’s Rejection of It
Ahead of the hearing, Boutros filed a 14-page submission with the Chicago Tribune asking that the hearing be cancelled. He argued he ‘believed in good faith’ that the complaint would be unsealed before he spoke about it publicly.
His written defence rested on what he characterised as carveout language in McNally’s order. As the Union-Bulletin reported, Boutros cited language he said did not prevent ‘law enforcement personnel from disclosing the Complaint.’ A formal court filing from the office similarly argued that the press announcement fell within a provision permitting disclosures ‘as necessary to facilitate the enforcement of criminal law,’ and that the government had ‘complied with the letter and spirit of the Court’s sealing order.’
McNally rejected that reading directly. ‘I would not have signed an order that permitted the full discretion of the entire law enforcement community to decide that “at this point we think what we are doing here should not be sealed,”‘ she said from the bench.
During the hearing itself, Boutros described the episode as ‘very regrettable and very unfortunate’ and distanced himself from the decision to hold the Washington press conference. ‘I didn’t ask for this press conference, I wasn’t looking to go to D.C.,’ he said, placing some responsibility with officials above him at the Department of Justice. He added that he had intended to honour the sealing order ‘while recognizing all the exigent circumstances that, quite candidly, I didn’t ask for.’
Separately, Boutros held a further press conference on 2 July at the Dirksen US Courthouse in Chicago, concerning a multiagency crime-fighting operation in the region, which was distinct from the Washington event at which the sealing violation occurred.
McNally’s bench ruling stops short of a contempt finding, but the court’s determination that a violation occurred leaves the matter on the record. Subject to any further proceedings, the question of whether the episode prompts institutional consequences for the office will depend on whether supervising authorities at Main Justice treat the judicial reprimand as requiring a formal response.
