A federal grand jury is investigating whether UAW President Shawn Fain abused his office to benefit his fiancée, then retaliated against the union official who refused to go along.
The Justice Department has opened a grand jury investigation into United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, subpoenaing the union's own court-appointed monitor as part of the probe, according to Bloomberg, Fortune and the Detroit News, which confirmed the investigation on July 12. The subpoena targets Neil Barofsky, the Jenner & Block attorney installed to police the UAW after a corruption scandal that sent two former union presidents to prison.
Barofsky's report concluded that he had "substantiated the claim that President Fain acted improperly to obtain financial benefits for his fiancée," and that UAW Vice President Rich Boyer's refusal to sign off on those benefits may have triggered Fain's retaliation against him. Fain is engaged to Keesha McConaghie, a financial analyst at the Stellantis National Training Center. According to the monitor's findings, Fain pushed for a financial bonus for McConaghie and pressed for a workers' compensation claim to be approved for her sister. When Boyer would not approve the arrangements, Fain stripped him of his post as the union's lead negotiator with Stellantis, the automaker that includes Chrysler, Jeep and Ram.
Boyer had held that Stellantis negotiator role as one of the UAW's most consequential jobs, overseeing the union's dealings with one of Detroit's Big Three automakers. Removing him from it, according to Barofsky's report, came after he refused to approve benefits for the union president's own family.
Fain denies the findings, blames politics
Fain has rejected the monitor's conclusions outright. In an open letter last month, he called Barofsky's report "false" and accused the monitor of harboring a "political grudge" tied to the UAW's 2024 resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Fain also said Boyer "fed the monitor false allegations" and is now telling associates he is weighing his "legal options," the Detroit News reported. Boyer's camp has not been quoted disputing that characterization in the reporting so far, and neither Boyer nor his representatives could be reached through the coverage reviewed for this story.
The timing matters. The grand jury subpoena lands just weeks before the UAW's International Executive Board election, and Fain has suggested Boyer's allegations are an attempt to influence that race. Whether that framing survives scrutiny is now a question for federal prosecutors, not internal union politics.
A union already under federal watch
The UAW has operated under a court-appointed monitor since 2021, the product of a Justice Department corruption investigation that resulted in prison time for former presidents Gary Jones and Dennis Williams, along with other union officials and auto executives who admitted to embezzling member dues and taking bribes from the companies they were supposed to be negotiating against. That monitorship was supposed to be the fix. Instead, the man running the union it was designed to watch is now the subject of a fresh grand jury inquiry, and the case reached that point only because the oversight structure installed after the last scandal did its job and flagged the new one.
Fain rose to the UAW presidency in 2023 as a reformer, promising to clean up exactly the kind of self-dealing that put his predecessors behind bars. He led the union's high-profile strike against the Big Three that fall and became one of organized labor's most visible national figures, campaigning alongside President Biden before later sparring publicly with the Trump administration over tariffs and auto policy. A grand jury investigation into his own conduct now sits uneasily against that reformer image.
No charges have been filed, and Fain has not been accused of a crime by prosecutors. A grand jury subpoena means investigators are gathering evidence, not that an indictment is coming. But the subpoena of the union's own monitor, someone appointed specifically to prevent this kind of conduct, signals the Justice Department is taking the allegations seriously enough to test them under oath. The UAW election is weeks away, and how the union's executive board and rank-and-file members respond to a sitting president under federal investigation will say as much about the union's reform effort as the outcome of the case itself.
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