Lawyer for Madigan co-defendant says legal jury lobbying is not bribery, says FBI’s view is ‘simply wrong’

CHICAGO — An attorney for the former confidant of former House Speaker Michael Madigan told a federal jury Tuesday that the bribery and corruption charges against the couple seek to legally criminalize lobbying and relationship building at the center of state politics set.

“The evidence will show that Mike McClain was a lobbyist, and like all lobbyists, he understood that if you want to gain access to a politician, you have to develop a relationship of trust,” attorney John Mitchell told the jury in his opening statement. .

Mitchell compared lobbying to selling, saying it’s all about the “hope” of meeting, having that relationship. Bribery, he said, is an exchange, an envelope of cash for a vote.

“A good lobbyist builds good positive relationships with elected officials,” Mitchell said. “If you don’t have access to a politician, you have no hope of convincing him.”

He said McClain “provided completely 100% legal favors to Mike Madigan” for the purpose of “building trust and maintaining and increasing access to Mike Madigan.”

The government’s view of the evidence “is just wrong,” Mitchell told jurors.

“They were so focused on Mike Madigan that they missed it,” he said. “He did not act in an attempt to bribe Mike Madigan or help him obtain bribes. … He is 100% innocent.”

“There’s an old saying: If you walk around with a hammer all day, you’ll eventually find something that looks like a nail,” Mitchell said. “The administration has wrongly concluded that Mike Madigan is powerful and therefore must be corrupt.”

The 82-year-old Madigan, who served for decades as speaker of the Illinois House and head of the state Democratic Party, is charged with racketeering for running his state and political operations as a criminal enterprise and scheming with utility giants ComEd and AT&T to expand his to lure cronies into a trap. on contracts that require little or no work and use his public position to win business for his private law firm.

Both Madigan and McClain, 77, a former ComEd lobbyist, have pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

It’s no surprise that prosecutors painted a very different picture, telling the jury in their opening statement Monday that Madigan ruthlessly used his position at the top of state politics to betray the public trust, increase his power, his friends enrich and strengthen its own position. to fail.

“Madigan abused his power and used the organization he led to engage in a pattern of corrupt behavior again and again,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Streicker told jurors.

Next to Madigan, Streicker said, was McClain, his longtime friend and political ally, who “protected Madigan and concealed Madigan’s involvement in corrupt activities.”

“Together, the defendants engaged in a bribery campaign,” she said. “A bribery campaign through which they took opportunities to leverage Madigan’s enormous power in the Illinois government to seek and accept bribes from people who needed something from the government. … This racket lasted for years.”

The prosecutors’ first witness was former state Rep. Carol Sente, a Democrat from Vernon Hills, who gave jurors a basic overview of the legislative process in Illinois and Madigan’s power over the fate of the legislation.

Sente was also one of the first witnesses called in the “ComEd Four” case last year.

Madigan met Sente in person before she took office so he could determine whether she would be a good fit for the job, she said. Every time he was re-elected as Speaker, he personally called her to ask for her support and for his all-important rules that control the room.

Although he initially assured Sente that she could always vote in a way that was best for her district, after taking office she soon learned that the speaker had specific ideas about what representatives should be like, creating “watch charts.” share with voting recommendations, especially for legislators. in the most competitive “target districts” like hers.

She said Madigan’s issues director, Will Cousineau, told her, “You have to follow the watch schedule exactly.” And she explained that if she didn’t want to go along with the watch card, the conversation would be “quite unfriendly.” She said she ultimately spoke one-on-one with Madigan about her votes five to seven times.

She detailed how Madigan was able to kill bills in the powerful House Rules Committee, where loyal lawmakers followed the speaker’s orders to advance bills for full hearings or bury them.

Two of Sente’s mortgage-related bills stalled in the Rules Committee, despite her repeated attempts to urge him to put the bills to a vote. She explained that she spoke with Madigan three times in 2011, but the conversations “naturally escalated.” She said she eventually approached Madigan on the House floor, and he bluntly told her, “‘I don’t want to talk about that bill again,’ and he said, ‘There’s no progress on it.'”

But when she sponsored legislation to impose 14-year terms on legislative leaders like the speaker, Madigan called for a meeting, she said.

She proposed legislation that would not be retroactive — meaning Madigan could serve another 14 years as speaker — and that Madigan’s previous decades as speaker would not prevent him from serving longer as head of the House.

Sente said their private meeting in his Capitol suite lasted about five minutes.

“He had a piece of paper with a summary of the bill,” she testified. “He pushed it to me and asked if I could explain why I submitted that.”

When Sente explained that she was a “strong believer” in leadership turnover, Madigan responded that “it takes a long time” to get organized, Sente said.

“I said, ’35 years?'” Sente testified. “Shortly afterwards the meeting was over.”

On cross-examination, Madigan attorney Daniel Collins tried to portray the speaker as hardworking and polite, not controlling or all-powerful.

Sente admitted that not every bill Madigan opposed would die in committee, including Sente’s “smoke-free campus” legislation, which Madigan voted against but was signed anyway. She also noted that she rarely saw him become visibly upset.

“He’s not yelling,” Sente said, appearing to smile in Madigan’s direction. Madigan smiled back.

Sente also acknowledged under cross-examination that she introduced the term law at the suggestion of a Madigan aide and that it burnished her image as an independent voice.

Collins also recanted her testimony about her predatory credit accounts that she said were frozen by Madigan. Madigan even supported a 2003 law that banned a variety of deceptive practices, including making loans to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back, she acknowledged.

The core of the prosecution’s evidence consists of hundreds of wiretapped recordings from McClain’s phone, as well as undercover videos taken by undercover operatives such as former ComEd director Fidel Marquez and then-councilman Daniel Solis.

Mitchell told the jury that despite all the secret recordings, there is no evidence that ComEd ever agreed to give Madigan anything in exchange for his help in passing legislation — which would cross the line from legal favors to bribery.

“You would think that if there was an exchange, there would be something there, something that would indicate an exchange,” Mitchell said.

He also took aim at Solis and his unprecedented deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office, telling the jury that in Solis, “You’re going to see what a real criminal looks like.”

Solis stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign money, Mitchell said. He received bribes including cash, Viagra and prostitutes. He lied to his own wife and family. And in exchange for his cooperation, he ‘gets a free pass’.

“Instead of going to federal prison, Solis is now going on vacation to tropical islands,” Mitchell said, reading the words from a slide he put on monitors in the courtroom. He said Solis cannot be trusted with anything.

“Not something small, not something big, and certainly not something as important as a federal corruption case,” he said.

Madigan’s lawyers, meanwhile, described the Democratic stalwart as a soft-spoken, non-confrontational Southwest Side man trying to advance his party’s working-class agenda.

Defense attorney Tom Breen branded the government’s cooperating witnesses as liars with an “axe to grind” who operated without the speaker’s knowledge or consent. video recordings that will dominate the eleven-week trial period.

What they will find, Breen said, is a man trying to provide jobs and opportunities to his constituents, following in the footsteps of his father, a 13th Ward superintendent.

“What you will see is that his intention, as his father taught him, was to protect the Democratic agenda. The working people,” Breen said. He said that while others may have been scheming behind Madigan’s back, “He doesn’t act like that.”

“He’s never demanded anything from anyone,” Breen said, at one point hitting the lectern for effect. ‘If anyone says yes, that’s nonsense. That’s just bull.”

The jury, made up of eight women and four men, is expected to hear evidence after Mitchell’s opening statement.

The next witness after Sente is expected to be Scott Drury, another former state representative who will give the jury an overview of how the Springfield General Assembly works and why Madigan wielded so much power and influence over legislation.

Also on the witness list for Tuesday is former state Rep. Lou Lang, a then-Madigan ally who was forced to resign by Madigan in 2018, reportedly with McClain’s help, after reports began circulating that a woman threatened to to go public. an accusation of sexual harassment.

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