In the rapidly unfolding federal corruption trial of former House Speaker Michael Madigan, Illinoisans are getting a close-up view of how the longtime Democratic chieftain lorded over the insider world of Springfield politics.
Madigan and his lobbyist ally Michael McClain may be the center of the case. But in many ways, so is the opaque manner in which Springfield does business.
Capitol denizens are watching closely — in the General Assembly, the governor’s office and the ranks of the so-called Third House, made up of the lobbyists who prowl in the Capitol rotunda for a chance to buttonhole a lawmaker or plead over the phone to pass or kill a bill.
The trial also takes place on a new legal landscape created by an opinion handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court walking back part of the federal bribery statute, which could lend significant ammunition to the defense in Madigan’s case.
In June, the high court ruled in the case of former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder that prosecutors must prove there was an agreement beforehand to exchange something of value for an official action, and that “gratuities,” or gifts given to politicians after the fact, are not illegal.
Lawyers in the case already have been seen tailoring their approach.
Keeping Madigan in charge
Madigan, 82, faces charges he abused his life-or-death power over legislation to squeeze out of ComEd and AT&T a series of contracts and jobs for his political cronies while the utilities had major legislative packages pending.
Wiretaps rolled out last week gave jurors a chance to listen in on how McClain, 77, a longtime ComEd contract lobbyist, worked feverishly with Madigan behind the scenes to get the speaker what he wanted.
They ultimately shared the same goal of keeping the speaker on the throne, the source of power for both of them. With Madigan serving a nationwide record 36 years in charge of the House, it was easy to see why McClain, a hired gun for numerous major companies, called the speaker his “real client.”
“My client is not ComEd, my client is not CBOE, my client is not Walgreens, my client is the speaker,” McClain advised a former Madigan staffer who had recently left to become a lobbyist in a February 2019 phone call. “Your client is only Mike Madigan. … It’s not anybody that hired you, it’s not your mom and dad. The only person you care about is Mike Madigan.”
The business of lobbying — the pushing and pulling of lawmakers to accept the position of special interests — gets fast and furious in the statehouse hallways.
Lobbying is perfectly legal. But the lines are blurry, the activity is secretive and the arguments that carry the day can be cloaked in a separate layer of political haze.
Madigan’s jurors, however, know little to nothing about this. They were selected in a painstaking two-week process that weeded out prospective jurors who showed any substantive knowledge about Illinois politics or Madigan — a man who has been making headlines for nearly a half a century.
At the close of the trial, they will have to discern what is right or wrong within Illinois’ high-octane partisan environment that takes years for lawmakers and lobbyists to master.
Prosecutors say Madigan ran his government and political operations like a criminal enterprise. Along with the charges involving ComEd and AT&T Illinois, prosecutors alleged Madigan worked with disgraced 25th Ward Ald. Danny Solis to transfer state property in Chinatown to the city so that Solis could clear a path for Madigan to line up property tax appeal business for his private law firm.
Solis is the undercover mole whose recordings brought down former 14th Ward Ald. Edward Burke over a series of shakedowns of developers and business owners. Prosecutors cut a deal with Solis for his cooperation in exchange for giving him a pass on his own alleged crimes, including taking money from developers with business before the Zoning Committee that Solis chaired.
Alderman Danny Solis
Burke is in federal prison. And now prosecutors have Madigan, the investigation’s No. 1 target, sitting at the defense table.
For years, Madigan, McClain and their defense teams have said prosecutors are trying to criminalize politics, a point echoed over and over in Springfield even as the burgeoning ComEd scandal led to Madigan’s ouster from the speakership in January 2021.
Just a week into testimony, the eight-woman, four-man jury in Madigan’s case is already getting a crash course on the power dynamics of the hard-hitting wheeling and dealing that goes into making laws in the General Assembly.
The outcome of the case could hinge on how deeply jurors understand the differences between routine and over-the-top interactions of lawmakers and lobbyists, a “legal favor” and an “illegal bribe,” and the overlap of personal and political power.
Last year, a different jury in the related ComEd Four bribery case clearly determined that the line had been crossed, delivering sweeping guilty verdicts against McClain and three others accused in the scheme to illegally influence Madigan.
After that verdict, jurors who spoke to the media said the panel felt the entire case was a disappointing reflection on how business is conducted at the state Capitol.
“Maybe going forward, even the young up-and-coming Springfield lobbyists … they can use this as, I guess, an example,” ComEd juror Robert Garnes told the Tribune. “We said to ourselves, (the defendants) had a chance to stop this. They really could. It didn’t have to go this far, but it did, because nobody tried to stop it. … They felt like they were untouchable or just (said) ‘to hell with it.’”
A post-Snyder world
The Snyder opinion came after that verdict. Madigan’s attorneys have not surprisingly seized on it, asking U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey to throw out the bribery counts and other major parts of the indictment ahead of trial.
The judge declined. However the Snyder ruling is sure to influence the all-important instructions that Blakey winds up giving the jury, which are a work in progress. In fact, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is working on new jury instructions that would address the Snyder ruling, which could be ready by the time Madigan’s jury starts deliberating.
The Supreme Court ruling has already had implications in several political corruption cases, including the Madigan-related bribery case against former AT&T Illinois boss Paul La Schiazza, which ended last month in a hung jury.
One juror told the Tribune after the mistrial was declared that there seemed to be very little daylight between the definition of lobbying and the definition of bribery they were given.
“This whole area is in a state of flux,” U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman said last month at a court hearing after the mistrial. Gettleman is now weighing whether La Schiazza should be retried or if the case should be dismissed.
Meanwhile, the jury instructions in Madigan’s case likely will include new language laying out the “exchange” that prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt to secure a conviction on the bribery counts.
That would explain why McClain’s attorney used the word “exchange” dozens of times in his opening statement, claiming the government had no proof of any prior arrangement and urging the panel over and over to scour the evidence — because there’s nothing there.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the government turned over heaven and earth to find an exchange,” Mitchell told the jury. “But when you hear all the evidence, you are going to realize that they failed. … It’s because there was no exchange. There was no agreement.”
Instead, Mitchell said the evidence will show that “Mike McClain was a lobbyist, and like all lobbyists (he) understood if you want to get access to a politician, you need to develop a relationship of trust.”
“Mike McClain did perfectly 100% legal favors for Mike Madigan … building trust and increasing access” to the speaker, he said.
Madigan’s ‘dirty work’
In their opening statement to the jury, prosecutors said the evidence will show Madigan trusted McClain for handling sensitive matters for him.
When Madigan didn’t want his fingerprints on something, he gave it to McClain, and witnesses will testify that when McClain asked for certain things, they knew the ask was coming from Madigan, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Streicker said.
“McClain handled Madigan’s dirty work, and as you will hear on the recordings, this was a role that McClain relished,” Streicker told the jury.
According to the charges, McClain orchestrated a scheme where ComEd bribed Madigan by showering political allies with $1.3 million worth of no-show jobs, lucrative legal business, numerous internships for college students in Madigan’s 13th Ward power base and a coveted spot on the utility’s board of directors.
Prosecutors alleged the wooing of Madigan resulted in a string of legislative victories for ComEd, including a massive smart-grid system designed to improve service and a formula-rate-making plan in 2011 as well as legislation that saved two nuclear plants for parent company Exelon in 2016.
So far, the early evidence in Madigan’s trial has largely mirrored the start of last year’s ComEd Four trial, including the testimony of former state Democratic legislators Carol Sente and Scott Drury, who told the jury how bills are maneuvered through the General Assembly and the rules that gave Madigan so much power over the process.
In the coming weeks, the jury is sure to hear a parade of wiretapped recordings first played in the ComEd Four case, including tapes where McClain pushes for the utility to funnel money to Ed Moody by explaining his value as a 13th Ward precinct captain.
On another now-legendary recording, McClain tells outgoing ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore and longtime utility lobbyist John Hooker he may need to have a “daddy talk” with the company’s new CEO Joe Dominguez to explain how to play the game to get bills passed.
“My instinct is that I come up to Chicago and I sit down with Dominguez and I say, ‘Now, look-it (expletive), if you want to pass this bill, this is what it requires,” McClain said in the February 2019 recording. “So, either you’re gonna play in the tier-one game here, or you’re gonna keep playing in your tier-two game here … but this is like serious business, it’s millions of dollars.’”
Recordings played in Madigan’s trial last week highlighted the bond between Madigan and McClain, who took “assignments” from Madigan even after retiring as a lobbyist and moving into more of a consulting and advisory position following ComEd’s 2016 legislative victory.
One of McClain’s more sensitive assignments came in 2018. That’s when the speaker called on McClain to tell longtime state Rep. Lou Lang of Skokie that his career on Madigan’s House Democratic leadership team was over and it was time to move on.
‘Lower the boom’
Lang survived an investigation of what he called a false and absurd allegation of sexual harassment and had hoped to resume a political trajectory that would have seen him rise to majority leader and, one day, possibly speaker.
But word started circulating that another potential allegation could emerge if Madigan decided to put Lang on his leadership team again.
Candid clandestine recordings revealed that McClain finally asked when he should “lower the boom” on Lang, Madigan said “sooner rather than later,” and Lang soon became a lobbyist.
Lang testified in the Madigan trial on Thursday, and lead prosecutor Amarjeet Bhachu prompted him to expand upon his testimony from a previous court appearance that highlighted the controversial campaign finance practice of “directed money.”
The maneuver is one in which Madigan, for example, would sometimes assign various contributors to send campaign donations to an intermediary, such as Lang, who then would pass along the money, as directed, to a lawmaker needing financial help in a tight election race.
The process is viewed as a way to camouflage the original donor, circumvent the state’s donation limits and provide less transparency than, for example, stricter federal campaign finance laws.
Lang told jurors that some of the campaign donations sent to him were “expected to be redirected to other candidates.” Lang also acknowledged that McClain even reached out to make sure that Lang would transfer various “directed” donations sitting in his campaign fund and send them to their intended destinations.
The testimony set the stage for a recording of Madigan telling McClain to “shut down” fundraising for a candidate who refused to use negative advertising against an opponent, providing prosecutors with a chance to underscore how the Madigan and McClain relationship extended to the all-important control of campaign funds.
At this point, the jurors may be getting a sense that some elements of legislative sausage-making are less than altruistic and more than confusing, shocking and distasteful. But the prosecution is just warming up.
Whether anything from the trial will provide clarity or guidance for state officials and lobbyists is doubtful, particularly in a House and Senate where lawmakers are allergic to major reforms, but the trial may give officials from the governor on down reasons to consider strengthening the weakest guardrails in a state never heralded as a beacon of good government.
Any changes in Springfield may depend on whether the alleged Madigan enterprise demonstrated an appropriate lesson on how to use clout and connections — or whether the case is proof that the former speaker and his friend are guilty as charged.
