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CHICAGO (CN) — A federal judge on Wednesday issued a large pretrial order in the case of former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, denying Madigan’s last efforts to duck multiple charges ahead of his corruption trial.
U.S. Attorneys indicted Madigan, who led the Illinois House for 36 years, on nearly two dozen felony counts of bribery, racketeering, fraud and conspiracy in March 2022. The federal prosecutors say he used his powerful position in Springfield, Chicago and the Democratic Party to help pass legislation favored by Commonwealth Edison, commonly known as ComEd. In exchange for pushing those laws through the legislature, prosecutors say, ComEd offered jobs, contracts and kickbacks to people in Madigan’s political network.
ComEd, the largest energy utility in Illinois, admitted to the yearslong bribery scheme in 2020 in exchange for a deferred prosecution agreement and a $200 million fine.
Madigan nevertheless argued a number of the government’s bribery charges should be thrown out, citing a June decision from the Supreme Court in the case Snyder v. USA . The ruling — stemming from corruption charges against the mayor of the Chicagoland town of Portage, Indiana — established that “gratuities” given to elected officials for past services do not qualify as bribes under the relevant criminal statute, and that a bribery charge requires evidence of a quid pro quo arrangement.
Madigan won a six-month reprieve on his trial, which was supposed to begin this past April, as the Supreme Court considered Snyder . After the high court ruled on the case in June, he said several of the bribery charges federal prosecutors brought against him should be dropped.
“The government must allege that Madigan solicited jobs from ComEd intending to take official acts to benefit ComEd in exchange for ComEd’s hiring decisions. It has not done so,” Madigan said in his motion.
U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey thought otherwise, writing Wednesday that “under Snyder , these allegations sufficiently allege a violation of [federal bribery law].”
“Contrary to defendants’ characterization, the indictment does not merely allege that ComEd hired certain individuals recommended by Madigan and that, during the same time period, Madigan happened to vote in favor of certain legislation affecting ComEd,” the Barack Obama appointee wrote. “Rather, it explicitly alleges that Madigan performed official acts related to legislation affecting ComEd in exchange for ComEd’s hiring of certain individuals.”
Blakey denied multiple other motions from Madigan and his co-defendant Mike McClain in the Wednesday order, including a motion to suppress certain evidence gathered with the help of former Chicago city councilor Danny Solis. Solis helped the FBI clandestinely record Madigan’s conversations on several occasions between 2016 and 2018 — he also wore a wire to gather evidence on fellow ex-city councilor Ed Burke, currently in prison for a separate corruption conviction this past December — in exchange for a sweetheart deferred prosecution agreement on his own corruption charges.
Much of the information Solis helped gather relates to a supposed arrangement going back to 2014 wherein Madigan would help a property developer move along the transfer of a state-owned land plot in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood, in exchange for the developer directing tax work to Madigan’s private law firm. But the former speaker argued in February 2023 that the government cherry-picked what information in presented to the court’s Chief Judge in wiretap affidavits, highlighting some elements while omitting others.
“The allegation that Madigan was knowingly involved in any extortion of the… developer was false. The affidavit used numerous quotes from the recording to give the Chief Judge the false impression that it somehow was a full and complete description of what took place. Actually, the quotes were carefully selected or omitted to create a false narrative,” Madigan wrote.
Again, Blakey came to a different conclusion.
“In this case, Madigan fails to make a substantial preliminary showing that the government intentionally or recklessly included any materially false statement, or made any material omissions, in the 2014 affidavit.”
Blakey also denied McClain’s motion to sever his trial from the ex-speaker’s, after McClain argued the two men’s defenses would contradict each other. McClain, a former Democratic Illinois state representative and ComEd lobbyist, was one of the “ComEd Four” whom jurors convicted in May 2023 for their own part in the energy utility’s bribery scheme between 2011 and 2019.
Blakey found McClain did not “show any serious risk of deprivation of a specific trial right which outweighs the interests of judicial economy in proceeding with a joint trial.”
Jury selection for Madigan and McClain’s trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 8.
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