The federal prosecutor at the center of a Justice Department scandal in Chicago — where a tainted grand jury indictment has tanked a case against anti-ICE activists — had been reassigned to work for Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats until Friday, but has now been summarily dismissed from that assignment.

Sheri H. Mecklenburg, a prosecutor who presented the case before the grand jury last year, had been in D.C. on a temporary assignment to work with ranking member Dick Durbin’s “criminal justice” team. She previously said publicly that she was working closely with the Illinois Democrat himself.

But after new judicial scrutiny and questions from reporters, Durbin’s office said her DOJ detail to the Senate Judiciary Committee has been cut short.

U.S. District Judge April Perry, who was overseeing the case, has raised the prospect of “sanctions for prosecutorial misconduct and for potential ethical violations, including lack of candor to the court” for those involved — including Mecklenburg.

“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,” Perry said in court yesterday at a hearing that examined grand jury transcripts that prosecutors had previously expurgated before turning them over.

The employment arrangement on the Judiciary Committee presented a potential conflict for Durbin, as he and fellow Democrats on the committee are positioned to demand answers about how the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago — and Mecklenburg in particular — bent the rules to obtain a politically controversial indictment against a group of activists that included then-congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.

“Senator Durbin agrees with Judge Perry’s concerns about this deeply flawed prosecution. Our office had no knowledge of this alleged misconduct until yesterday’s reporting. While the Senate Judiciary Committee doesn’t directly employ Sheri Mecklenburg, because of the gravity of the charges in this case, her detail from the Department of Justice has been terminated,” a spokesperson with his office said in a statement.

On Thursday, the judge expressed severe concerns about the way prosecutors acted in this case.

“I was incredibly shocked by the redactions that were made. 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. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts,” Perry said.

Exact details about what happened remain unclear, because the grand jury transcripts themselves are not yet public — although they might be eventually, if the judge decides to release them as the inquiry proceeds.

A courtroom discussion about the matter on Thursday revealed that Mecklenburg and at least one other junior prosecutor made several glaring errors while trying to persuade grand jurors to criminally accuse a group of protesters known as “the Broadview Six” who were demonstrating outside of the ICE Broadview Processing Center in the Chicago suburbs.

First, Mecklenburg engaged in what the judge called “improper prosecutorial vouching to the grand jurors, with the [assistant U.S. attorney] putting her personal credibility and trustworthiness on the line in support of the charges” — as opposed to playing it straight and simply presenting whatever evidence the government purported to have that these activists were breaking the law.

Second, the grand jury appears to have outright rejected the government’s prosecution attempt the first time around by filing a “no true bill,” a once-rare sign of distrust that has become increasingly frequent during the second Trump administration’s prosecutions of progressives and those considered enemies of the MAGA cause.

Third, was the highly abnormal maneuver which involved “the prosecutor excusing grand jurors who disagreed with the government’s case from the deliberations process,” the judge said. Mecklenburg and the junior prosecutor are essentially accused of eliminating those who wouldn’t go along with the prosecution — a tactic that flies in the face of the very reason there exists a grand jury to consider and argue the merits of a case.

Fourth, in the midst of this unusual courtroom drama, DOJ lawyers are accused of having “improper prosecutorial communications of substantive nature with the grand jurors outside of the grand jury room.”

All of those missteps were made worse by the fact that prosecutors gave the judge grand jury transcripts that conveniently happened to redact the very misconduct that she just became aware of this week. While the judge thought only a few dozen lines were missing, in reality entire pages were pulled from the file she’d received.

In court on Thursday, a less experienced prosecutor who worked alongside Mecklenburg on obtaining the indictment seemed to throw her under the bus. Matthew Skiba told the judge he’d only presented before one other federal grand jury — and that one was a simple matter involving street-level gun crimes.

“So in full candor, Your Honor, I started with this office on July 14th. I had been with the office for

less than two months. This was the second time I was before a grand jury,” he said. “Ms. Mecklenburg is not here to defend herself. I am not trying to deflect blame, but I was with a 20-years-plus senior veteran.”