CHICAGO – For nearly three months, government lawyers in former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s federal corruption trial have tried to drill home the amount of control the longtime Democratic powerbroker wielded in Springfield.
Whether or not the jury is convinced that Madigan held all the cards during his record 36 years as House speaker, the career politician on Monday found himself in a position with no control: on the witness stand for cross-examination by the lead prosecutor in his case.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Amarjeet Bhachu, who’s spent nearly half of his two-decade career as a prosecutor with Madigan in his crosshairs, wasted no time confronting the former speaker with a wiretapped phone call that had been barred from trial until last week.
Read more: Jurors to hear tape of Madigan saying ComEd contractors ‘made out like bandits’
“That’s you laughing there, isn’t it, sir?” Bhachu asked Madigan after playing a clip from an August 2018 call between Madigan and longtime Statehouse lobbyist Mike McClain. The pair are co-defendants in the trial, with Madigan facing 23 bribery or other public corruption counts and McClain facing six.
In the call, Madigan jokes to McClain that certain contractors for electric utility Commonwealth Edison “have made out like bandits.”
“Oh my God,” McClain agreed. “For very little work too.”
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While the pair had referenced a labor leader earlier in the call, it’s unclear what other contractors they were referencing. On Monday, prosecutors didn’t insinuate any of the individuals referenced in the call were part of Madigan and McClain’s alleged bribery scheme aimed at ComEd.
But Bhachu contrasted the acknowledgement with Madigan’s own claim last week that he was “very angry” to learn from prosecutors that his allies hadn’t worked for their checks from ComEd, which in one instance dated back to 2011.
Read more: ‘They were being paid as a favor to Mike Madigan’: Feds’ star witness takes stand | ComEd lobbyist warned FBI mole to ‘keep Madigan happy’ and not mess with no-work contracts
He also claimed he knew nothing of the no-work contracts until details of the feds’ investigation began to surface publicly in 2019 – a detail that U.S. District Judge John Blakey last week cited as reason to reverse his pretrial decision to block prosecutors from playing the call.
“Mr. Madigan, before you began testifying last week, sir, you took an oath, didn’t you?” Bhachu asked, kicking off more than three hours of questioning Monday afternoon.
“Yes I did,” Madigan replied.
“And you knew that oath required you to tell the whole truth, not just part of it, sir?” Bhachu asked, more of a statement than a question.
“Yes,” Madigan said.
Bhachu v. Madigan
Bhachu’s face-off with Madigan seemed an unlikely prospect throughout trial; McClain formally waived his right to testify in his own defense shortly before the holiday break last month.
Madigan’s decision to testify – foretold only by an increase in family members present in the courtroom Tuesday morning – was a stunning turn of events for a trial that seemed to be winding down.
Read more: Madigan takes witness stand, denying he traded ‘public office’ for ‘private gain’ | Madigan to take witness stand in his corruption trial
The famously reserved Madigan spent hours under questioning from his attorney Dan Collins last week. The pair sought to paint a picture of a five-decade career in politics and law marked by “hard work and discipline,” a tough upbringing, and a devotion to the family he created with a single mother he met as a young legislator.
He butted heads with McClain’s attorney only a few times during a short cross-examination last week, which mostly allowed the former speaker to further deny knowing the details of tasks he delegated to McClain.
Throughout decades of friendship dating back to the 1970s when they served together in the Illinois House, Madigan came to rely on McClain and would often ask the successful lobbyist to find job opportunities for the many people who asked the speaker for help.
That was the case for the five political allies who received no-work contracts with ComEd, along with many other examples included in trial and outside of it, Madigan testified.
But Bhachu on Monday had little patience for the former speaker’s sometimes lengthy explanations, often chiding Madigan for not answering the question he’d asked.
The courtroom, packed with so many onlookers that court officials opened a second overflow room with a video feed, watched as Bhachu questioned Madigan about his efforts to help find employment for the son of longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush.
In 2008, Jeffrey Rush was sentenced to six months in state custody for having sexual relationships with female inmates while working as a security supervisor at a halfway house run by the Illinois Department of Corrections. The jury was not told of Rush’s guilty plea or jail time but was told of his firing from IDOC for what Madigan characterized as “a big mistake.”
“This is a guy I’m gonna wanna help somewhere along the road,” Madigan said of Rush in another wiretapped call in August 2018, a little over a decade after his sentencing.
The former speaker said Congressman Rush had recently told him about his son’s past and asked if he could help. Madigan asked for his resume and then passed it along to McClain, he testified.
“You knew he’d abused his position of public trust?” Bhachu asked of Rush’s taxpayer-funded job with the state prison system.
“Ten years prior,” Madigan replied, going on to say that he was interested in how Rush was “trying to rehabilitate himself,” noting he’d spent five years doing community outreach for a church on Chicago’s South Side.
McClain never found a job for Rush, even after asking a ComEd official about him months later in a phone call jurors heard earlier in trial. But in a newly introduced exhibit Monday, Bhachu showed Rush’s temporary $20-per-hour consultant contracts with one of Madigan’s campaign funds for the fall of 2018 into the beginning of 2019. The former speaker testified that Rush worked on legislative campaigns that election cycle.
Imbalance of loyalty
Bhachu also used the Rush episode in an attempt to combat Madigan’s efforts at distancing himself from McClain.
“You trusted Mr. McClain with sensitive matters, didn’t you sir?” Bhachu asked.
“Sometimes,” Madigan answered.
“This is a sensitive matter here, isn’t it, sir?” Bhachu asked.
“Sensitive in the fact that he’d made a mistake,” Madigan replied.
Minutes earlier, Bhachu showed the jury a letter already published earlier in trial, in which McClain told Madigan of his impending retirement from lobbying in December 2016. McClain wrote that he “wanted to let my real client know” – a phrase Madigan acknowledged he’d heard his friend use about him in the past.
The effusive letter also promised that “At the end of the day I am at the bridge with my musket standing with and for the Madigan family” and that he’d “never leave” the former speaker’s side.
“You knew Mr. McClain was loyal to you,” Bhachu asked.
“Yes I did,” Madigan answered.
“Were you loyal to him?” Bhachu asked?
“Well I don’t think I was as loyal to him as he was to me,” the former speaker replied.
After more back and forth, Madigan landed on a definition of loyalty as “I viewed him as a friend and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt him,” but insisted that he didn’t always follow McClain’s advice.
“That’s not what I asked,” Bhachu said.
Madigan also claimed he could not recall a time when he reciprocated McClain’s expressions of loyalty.
During the exchange, McClain sat stone-faced at his own defense table at the far side of the courtroom.
Earlier in the day, one of McClain’s attorneys asked to renew a previously denied motion for severance from Madigan in trial. Last summer, McClain’s defense team predicted that Madigan would try to throw him under the bus and McClain would “be in effect prosecuted by ambush.”
‘A big red flag’
In addition to the “made out like bandits” wiretap, the feds last week won the right to introduce two more bits of evidence: a handful of short segments from a 2009 videotaped interview with Madigan reflecting on Chicago’s old patronage system and a deposition he gave in September 2018.
The former was given as part of an oral history project about longtime Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, while the latter was taken as part of a federal lawsuit filed by an unsuccessful challenger to Madigan’s Illinois House seat in the 2016 Democratic primary election.
Bhachu contrasted Madigan’s matter-of-fact comments about the patronage system being a way to beef up the Democratic Party’s army of volunteers – and the fact that, at least in 2009, he viewed it as “creeping into its grave” but not quite dead – with his sworn deposition nearly a decade later.
In that deposition, Madigan said his test for hiring someone was that they be “honest, hardworking people with integrity.”
“Would you agree with me, sir, that somebody who abuses their position of public trust by getting involved sexually with an inmate, that’s not a person of integrity?” Bhachu asked, referring again to Jeffrey Rush.
“At that time, yes,” Madigan replied, reiterating that Rush had been fired from IDOC more than a decade before he hired him.
Bhachu also took Madigan through a series of wiretapped phone conversations he’d had with then-Chicago Ald. Danny Solis in 2017 and 2018, beginning a year into Solis’ cooperation with the FBI.
Madigan and Collins had attempted to recontextualize some of those exchanges last week, with Madigan saying he had “a great deal of surprise and concern” during a June 2017 phone call in which Solis explicitly mentioned a “quid pro quo.”
The speaker had asked Solis, then the chair of Chicago City Council’s powerful zoning committee, to introduce him to a real estate developer behind a proposed apartment complex project in the city’s booming West Loop neighborhood. At the direction of the FBI, Solis arranged for the meeting, but first falsely told Madigan that his approvals of the zoning changes necessary for the project would be predicated on the developer contracting with the speaker’s property tax appeals law firm.
“This was a big red flag for you, right? That’s why you had a great deal of concern?” Bhachu asked.
Madigan last week testified that he’d continued thinking about Solis’ words in the weeks before a meeting was set up and decided to confront the alderman there. In a secretly recorded video the jury saw in November – and again on Monday – the speaker pulled Solis aside for a private conversation before the meeting with the developer, telling him: “You shouldn’t be talking like that.”
According to Madigan, Solis’ facial expression after the brief scolding told him “he got the message.”
But Bhachu took the former speaker through five more exchanges with Solis from 2017 and 2018 in which Bhachu said the alderman was “again suggesting something inappropriate.” Often in those recordings, Bhachu pointed out, Madigan responded with seemingly agreeable phrases like “okay, very good.”
While Madigan insisted that he was trying to dodge Solis’ questions by answering in that way, Bhachu asked why the former speaker still agreed to forward Solis’ name to newly elected Gov. JB Pritzker in the fall of 2018 for a lucrative appointment to a state board.
“In spite of all those statements, you were prepared to actually recommend him for a board position, right?” Bhachu asked.
“I was prepared to entertain the possibility I would submit his name,” Madigan replied.
Previous testimony from the former speaker’s chief of staff at the time and former Pritzker staffer-turned-congresswoman Nikki Budzinski indicated the recommendation was never made before Solis’ cooperating witness cover was blown in January 2019.
Madigan will be back on the stand for further cross-examination on Tuesday.
(Reporting by: HANNAH MEISEL, Capitol News Illinois)
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.
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