CHICAGO (Capitol News Illinois) – Jurors hearing former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s trial are finally scheduled to begin deliberations Wednesday afternoon more than three months after testimony in the case began.
But one day before the government began its final rebuttal, a lawyer for Madigan’s co-defendant, longtime Statehouse lobbyist Mike McClain, urged the jury on Tuesday not to fill in what he called “holes” in the feds’ case with suspicion or speculation. Instead, McClain attorney Pat Cotter asked jurors to consider his client’s motivations through the lens of McClain’s decadeslong friendship with Madigan.
“Did this very real, very unique – and I would submit to you based on the overall evidence in this case – very decent human being … intend to bribe someone he considered one of his closest friends?” Cotter asked. “If there’s a doubt in your mind, then I suppose you’ll have your verdict.”
What the jury doesn’t know is that McClain, who’d for years been electric utility Commonwealth Edison’s lead external lobbyist in Springfield, has already been convicted of bribing Madigan in the related “ComEd Four” trial in 2023. In both cases, prosecutors allege the bribes – in the form of jobs and contracts for Madigan allies – greased the wheels for the passage of a few big ComEd-backed laws beginning in 2011.
The jury did briefly hear testimony in November that McClain’s three alleged co-conspirators were charged but was not told of their ultimate convictions while they heard details of the five no-work contracts given to Madigan allies, along with those who did perform legitimate work for ComEd.
Between the ComEd Four verdict and the beginning of the current trial, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed its interpretation of the federal bribery statute, emphasizing that there must be a quid pro quo agreement in place before an elected official takes “official action.”
The justices also indicated a defendant had to have a corrupt intent to qualify as a bribe. As a result, attorneys on both sides have hit the theme of intent hard in this last week of closing arguments.
Defense lawyers emphasized that Madigan and McClain had no corrupt intent when the speaker passed along job recommendations to ComEd and McClain made efforts to find work for them. The two men had frequently followed a similar dynamic for job recommendations prior to the occurrence of the first alleged bribe in 2011, and job recommendations from public officials were common for ComEd and lobbyists in general, Cotter said.
“I think the government wants you to believe that their relationship was at least partially a criminal conspiracy,” Cotter said of McClain’s and Madigan’s friendship. “I don’t think the evidence backs that up.”
The pair are accused of running a “criminal enterprise” focused on enhancing the speaker’s power while enriching Madigan and those around him.
Friendship ‘casualty’
McClain and Madigan met in the early 1970s as young Democratic legislators in Springfield after McClain replaced his father in the House upon his sudden death. Their friendship continued after McClain lost his seat in the 1982 election and became a lobbyist. As several witnesses testified earlier in trial, McClain had nearly unparalleled access to Madigan, often taking up residency in the speaker’s suite of offices in the Capitol on session days and meeting him for dinner many evenings.
In addition to his role as ComEd’s chief lobbyist responsible for maintaining the utility’s relationship with Madigan, McClain was also a political advisor to the speaker, Cotter reminded the jury – and “also his good friend.”
“We know now he’s not, and that’s – I guess that’s a casualty of this case,” Cotter said Tuesday, hearkening back to Madigan’s own testimony earlier this month that his friendship with McClain survived for decades “until recently,” not elaborating. “But it was real. And it shouldn’t be dismissed or minimized. Not by the government, not by anybody, and I hope not by you.”
Inset photo here
During Madigan’s time on the witness stand and closing arguments, the former speaker’s attorney Dan Collins took steps to distance his client from McClain. At one point on Monday, Collins derided the former lobbyist as “Mr. Important,” suggesting McClain exaggerated conversations with Madigan in relaying them to others in order to lend him more gravitas. McClain’s lawyers had predicted the move in the summer when they asked for his case to be severed from Madigan’s, a request they renewed and were again denied after Madigan’s testimony.
Collins on Monday also lightly mocked a letter McClain sent to Madigan and his wife to announce his retirement from lobbying in late 2016, in which McClain wrote: “At the end of the day I am at the bridge with my musket standing with and for the Madigan family. I will never leave your side, Shirley and Mike.”
“Who talks like that?” Collins asked the jury.
But Cotter on Tuesday pointed to the letter – “that never in a million years did he imagine we’d be standing in federal court in Chicago and his lawyer would be reading it” – as both a sign of deep devotion to Madigan and an obvious signal that there was no alleged bribe.
“Does a person who’s been bribing Mike Madigan for five years write that letter?” he asked. “Does he tell him how much he admires him, how much he respects him, how much he loves him? Does that make sense to you?”
At his defense table at the far wall of the courtroom from the jury box, McClain seemed to get emotional when his attorney discussed the letter, at one point grabbing a tissue. He and Madigan have spent most of the last three months avoiding each other in the courtroom, though their families have interacted and have mutual friends who’ve attended trial to support them.
“And if you’re trying to figure out what was his motivation, what was his intent?” Cotter said of McClain’s actions like job recommendations that prosecutors were criminal. “You’ve gotta consider that it was friendship.”
‘What does he care?’
Cotter made the same case when picking apart charges related to McClain’s assistance – at Madigan’s behest – with a legislative request from Chicago Ald. Danny Solis. As it turned out, the alderman had been an undercover FBI cooperator, and his secret recordings of Madigan and McClain landed both men in federal court while Solis has been promised no prison time for his own unrelated crimes.
The FBI’s attention turned to Madigan in mid-2017 after the speaker made an out-of-the-blue call to Solis asking for an introduction to a real estate developer. At that point, Solis had been cooperating with the government for a year. And after Solis brought the developer to Madigan’s property tax appeals law firm office a few weeks later, he brought up an apartment complex project that he wanted to see done in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood, which was in his 25th Ward.
But since the project was proposed for a strip of land owned by the state of Illinois, the General Assembly would need to approve of the land transfer to the city so it could ultimately be sold to a real estate developer. When Solis asked for help in that initial meeting, Madigan noted that he wasn’t terribly popular with then-Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner at the time as the two had just emerged from a bitterly fought two-year budget impasse.
So Madigan asked McClain to get involved, who then recruited Republican lobbyist Nancy Kimme to work with the Rauner administration. Prosecutors last week pointed out that Solis explicitly told McClain in a December 2017 meeting that the Chinatown developers would give Madigan their property tax business after the land transfer was completed.
Collins this week focused on the fact that Solis never made any such claim to the speaker until March 2018 – more than nine months after Madigan first tried to be helpful to Solis about the Chinatown effort. He reiterated testimony from multiple witnesses, including Madigan’s longtime law partner, that the speaker’s law firm had a strict conflict of interest policy that would never have allowed the firm to take on clients who’d gotten land from the state.
But Cotter asked the jury if it made sense that McClain would care about the speaker’s legal fees at all, considering he had no financial interest in the firm. Cotter also pointed to an April 2018 call between McClain and Solis in which the alderman tried to tell McClain there was more community support for the planned development than McClain could see. The attorney contended that was a lie.
“Mike wants to shut it down if there’s no community support,” Cotter said of the proposed apartment complex Tuesday. “If this is about getting legal fees for Speaker Madigan, what does he care if the community likes it?”
‘Fidel Marquez is a liar’
Cotter on Tuesday also went after the government’s other star witness, former ComEd executive Fidel Marquez, who began cooperating with the FBI after agents approached him in January 2019 and secretly recorded meetings with McClain and their other colleagues.
Cotter reminded the jury of Marquez’s “long history of lying,” including to a judge during his divorce proceedings a decade ago and last spring when he attempted to buy a gun in Arizona and did not check the box that said he was convicted of a felony.
When questioned on cross-examination in November about McClain bringing job recommendations to ComEd from Madigan, Marquez acknowledged that it was part of McClain’s job as the utility’s chief external lobbyist – and that not all of the recommendations were hired.
Cotter also pointed out that Marquez kept his contention vague when testifying about the purpose of the alleged bribery conspiracy, repeatedly saying giving jobs and contracts to Madigan allies was to keep Madigan “positively disposed” toward ComEd’s legislative agenda.
“He never said, ‘The purpose of our conspiracy was to trade jobs for official action,’” Cotter said. “Even when he was asked about trading jobs, he won’t go there. Won’t say it.”
Marquez also agreed that finding jobs for those Madigan recommended was a “favor,” which is legally allowed, Cotter said.
“No one else told you there was a conspiracy,” Cotter told the jury, raising his voice slightly. “The only witness who came in here and said that is Fidel Marquez. And Fidel Marquez is a liar.”
By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
hmeisel@capitolnewsillinois.com
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.
Comments