By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
[email protected]
SPRINGFIELD – A federal judge on Monday granted a partial retrial on several bribery counts in the case of four former executives and lobbyists for electric utility Commonwealth Edison who were convicted in 2023 for their roles in bribing longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.
U.S. District Judge Manish Shah tossed four of the nine counts on which the “ComEd Four” were convicted, agreeing with defense attorneys that the jury was wrongly instructed in light of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last summer that narrowed federal bribery law.
But Shah left the other five convictions intact, including on an overarching conspiracy count and charges that the four were responsible for falsifying ComEd’s records to conceal the alleged bribery. Prosecutors alleged the defendants bribed Madigan with jobs and contracts for the speaker’s political allies in exchange for Madigan’s help passing legislation backed by the company.
It’s unclear what will happen next in the case, which was one in a series leading up to Madigan’s own lengthy trial that ended in a split verdict last month. Prosecutors could accept Shah’s order to retry the bribery counts or the feds could appeal his decision to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu, the lead prosecutor in the Madigan-related cases, said Monday a retrial on the bribery counts may be “somewhat fruitless,” according to reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times. He indicated that the feds may instead want to proceed to sentencing, though he noted he’d need to check with his superiors within the Department of Justice.
Sentencing hearings for the ComEd Four defendants were scheduled for early 2024 but had been postponed after the Supreme Court agreed to review the 2021 conviction of a northwest Indiana mayor who accepted $13,000 from a company that had recently won contracts to sell garbage trucks to the city.
Former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder argued that payment was a “gratuity” – an after-the-fact “thank you” – and not a bribe. In June, the court’s conservative majority agreed.
The court’s review of the case also delayed Madigan’s own trial until October, and though the judge in his case declined to throw out any charges in light of the court’s ruling, the decision did play into the lengthy 100-plus pages of jury instructions given in January.
Last month, the jury in Madigan’s case convicted the former speaker on 10 of the 23 counts against him in a case that incorporated the ComEd allegations under an overarching racketeering charge accusing Madigan of running a “criminal enterprise.”
But the jury deadlocked on that and five other counts against Madigan and his co-defendant, longtime Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain. The jury also acquitted Madigan on seven counts of bribery, extortion and other corruption charges.
In interviews with Capitol News Illinois, jury members indicated the majority of jurors wanted to acquit on the charges they ended up deadlocking on, including those involving alleged bribery by AT&T Illinois executives.
A jury in September deadlocked on charges against former AT&T Illinois president Paul La Schiazza, who was accused of bribing Madigan in a similar, albeit smaller, scheme to ComEd’s. But the judge in that case refused to acquit La Schiazza and ordered a new trial for June.
The only bribery charges the jury convicted Madigan on involved alleged no-work contracts for Madigan’s allies. That included a handful of former precinct committeemen, Chicago aldermen and a Democratic state lawmaker who were paid a total of $1.3 million over the course of eight years despite doing little or no work for their purported consulting contracts.
Though McClain, who spent decades lobbying for ComEd, was not convicted alongside Madigan last month, he was convicted on similar criminal charges as part of the “ComEd Four” trial.
Three of the four charges Judge Shah threw out Monday were only alleged against McClain and former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore, while the fourth was also lodged against former ComEd lobbyists John Hooker and Jay Doherty.
In making his ruling Monday, Shah made clear that he was not accepting defense attorneys’ assertions that the ComEd Four jury had handed up convictions on a theory of gratuities like those at issue in the Supreme Court’s Snyder decision.
In fact, he said there was plenty of evidence that bribery did occur, citing the $1.3 million in payments for do-nothing contracts that Madigan’s associates raked in between 2011 and 2019.
“A reasonable jury could have determined Madigan had his metaphorical hand out in advance,” Shah said, according to reporting from the Chicago Tribune.
But Shah said that there was enough reasonable doubt to grant a new trial on the bribery counts because it’s not clear that the jury would have reached the same verdict if given instructions more in line with the Supreme Court’s Snyder decision.
Shah declined to stay the case based on President Trump’s recent executive order calling for a pause and review of how the Justice Department enforces the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Of the five counts that remain intact, the four records falsification charges are tied to the FCPA.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
