Andrew Boutros, the top federal prosecutor in Chicago, said Thursday evening that his office has not opened a criminal investigation into advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, contradicting earlier reports from multiple news organizations that the Justice Department was looking into whether she lied during civil litigation against Donald Trump.
Boutros, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, issued a statement roughly 24 hours after the initial reports surfaced. His office “has not opened — and has never opened — a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll,” Boutros said.
The clarification addressed reports from the Associated Press and other national outlets that cited anonymous sources saying the federal prosecutors’ office in Chicago had opened an investigation into Carroll examining possible perjury allegations. Those reports indicated the Justice Department was examining whether Carroll’s testimony or public statements in her civil case against Trump contained false claims.
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist, first publicly accused Trump in a 2019 New York magazine essay. Three subsequent civil juries in New York found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and defaming her. The civil verdicts triggered the renewed media scrutiny over potential criminal exposure, though Boutros’s Thursday evening statement explicitly denied that any such probe exists in his district.
The sequence of conflicting reports highlights the opacity of federal investigative work when sourced anonymously. News organizations relayed the alleged perjury probe based on federal-source intelligence, but a primary statement from the sitting U.S. attorney directly refuted those accounts. Prosecutors’ offices routinely decline to comment on active or potential investigations, but an outright denial typically closes the door on a specific district’s involvement unless federal oversight shifts jurisdiction elsewhere.