7th Circuit orders release, new trial for two ‘ComEd Four’ defendants

By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
hmeisel@capitolnewsillinois.com

Article Summary

Just hours after their lawyers argued to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, the three-judge panel ordered the release of longtime Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain and former Commonwealth Edison CEO Anne Pramaggiore.
McClain and Pramaggiore are one half of the “ComEd Four” defendants convicted in 2023 for bribing ex-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

The appellate judges indicated they would also grant a new trial for the pair, in part because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision narrowing the scope of federal bribery law.

This summary was written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

CHICAGO — Two key figures in the federal corruption case against ex-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan were ordered released from prison Tuesday just hours after their lawyers argued for a new trial in front of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Longtime Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain and former Commonwealth Edison CEO Anne Pramaggiore — half of the group that become known as the “ComEd Four” after their 2020 indictment on charges they bribed Madigan — will also receive a new trial. Their codefendants did not appeal their convictions but have already been released to halfway houses after serving monthslong sentences in federal prison.

The three-judge panel issued a short order barely four hours after it finished hearing consolidated appeals arguments in the cases. In it, they wrote that “Both Pramaggiore and McClain are entitled to release” on bond while awaiting a new trial. It’s unclear when the judges will publish their longer opinion formally ordering a new trial.

“The United States must make arrangements to release Pramaggiore and McClain from federal custody forthwith,” the order said.

Bribery allegations

The 7th Circuit’s decision also comes less than a week after lawyers for Madigan made arguments to a different three-judge appeals panel for the longtime Democratic power broker’s own convictions to be overturned. Madigan is six months into a 7 ½-year sentence on related bribery and other corruption charges, including for having solicited jobs for political allies at ComEd in exchange for helping advance the utility’s legislative agenda in Springfield.

McClain has served 3 ½ months in a Lexington, Kentucky-based facility run by the federal Bureau of Prisons for federal inmates with chronic health conditions, while Pramaggiore just passed the three-month mark in a minimum-security prison in Florida’s panhandle.

A jury found the pair guilty in May 2023, along with former ComEd executive John Hooker and longtime Chicago City Hall lobbyist Jay Doherty. As the two marquee defendants, McClain and Pramaggiore both received two years in prison at their sentencing hearings last summer.

Those sentences would likely have been much longer, but U.S. District Judge Manish Shah last March tossed the four bribery charges against them and granted a partial retrial based on a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision that narrowed the scope of federal bribery law. However, prosecutors opted instead to proceed straight to sentencing and moved to dismiss the bribery counts after each sentencing hearing.

Shah, who took over the case after the death of the trial judge in 2024, based his sentences and fines of the ComEd Four on the remaining charges, including an overarching conspiracy count.

Also still at play were their convictions on four counts alleging the defendants falsified ComEd’s business records to hide payments to a handful of Madigan allies hired as do-nothing subcontractors through ComEd lobbyists close to the speaker. The payments, which began with one political ally of the speaker in 2011, added up to $1.3 million to five men over a period of eight years.

SCOTUS bribery decision

Pramaggiore’s attorney, Paul Clement, told the judges Tuesday that in light of the 2024 Supreme Court decision narrowing the federal bribery statute, the jury may have convicted on incorrect law, and a new trial must be granted. He rejected any notion that it was just a “harmless error.”

In their June 2024 Supreme Court decision, the 6-3 conservative majority narrowed the scope of federal bribery statute to exclude “gratuities,” which the court defined as after-the-fact payments to an elected politician not tied to any official acts. While the ComEd Four case wasn’t tried on a theory of gratuities, defense attorneys repeatedly characterized responding to job recommendations from politicians as just a part of lobbying.

Clement argued that there was no way to know whether the jury found the ComEd Four guilty of the overarching conspiracy count based on bribery, the first of four elements to the charge.

“Everybody, I think, acknowledges that the (bribery) counts were the dog, and the books-and-records counts were the tail,” he told the judges.

Judge Thomas Kirsch II, an appointee of President Donald Trump, appeared to agree. He barely allowed Assistant U.S. Attorney Irene Sullivan to finish her first sentence insisting that even if there had been a legal error in the jury instructions, it “did not impact the jury’s verdict.”

“How so?” Kirsch asked. “I mean, here’s the problem: When you charge the case and try the case as a bribery case, what’s to say the jury just didn’t consider the illegal bribery object of the conspiracy and stop right there?”

Sullivan argued that the totality of the jury’s convictions should point back to the evidence the government presented and the witnesses prosecutors called to testify, including ComEd executive-turned-FBI-cooperator Fidel Marquez.

“The evidence at trial showed defendants knew that they were funneling payments to Madigan cronies through no-show subcontract positions, and that falsifying comments books and records and circumventing the company’s internal controls was critical to hiding the true nature and purpose of the payments,” she said.

Hidden subcontractor payments

Despite the reduced scope of sentencing, Shah made it clear at each of the defendants’ hearings that he still believed they committed bribery, telling Pramaggiore: “You did participate in a quid pro quo.” He also sided with prosecutors’ claims that the former executive lied on the witness stand while testifying in her own defense at trial.

The judge also referenced a February 2019 wiretapped call in which McClain told Hooker, “we had to hire these guys because Mike Madigan came to us … It’s just that simple.”

“If the simple truth was that ComEd had to hire these guys because Mike Madigan came to them, well, the shareholders, the market and the public had a right to know,” Shah told McClain during his July sentencing. “If that’s how consequential decisions are made in our democracy, you should’ve disclosed that.”

But on Tuesday, McClain’s attorney Joel Bertocchi made the case that failure to disclose the subcontractors wasn’t a crime. He leaned on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in the government’s case against former Chicago Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson for lying to bank regulators. In their unanimous opinion, the justices ruled the law doesn’t criminalize statements that are misleading but not false.

Bertocchi also pointed to multiple witnesses who testified at trial that ComEd’s internal documentation system did not leave room for contracted entities to disclose subcontractors. Further, some of those same witnesses also noted they signed off on not disclosing subcontractors because the lobbyists had “sole discretion” over how to staff up to fulfill their contracts.

“You can’t make a false records count out of the omission of information that was neither asked for nor expected,” Bertocchi said. “If ComEd thinks its books and records are accurate without listing subcontractors … then no defendant in this case or in any case who’s submitting those forms is going to question their judgment.”

But Judge Joshua Kolar, an appointee of President Joe Biden, interrupted Bertocchi’s argument about ComEd’s internal systems to make an observation:

“Mr. Bertocchi, that seems to then create the roadmap, right?” Kolar said. “This is the roadmap for corruption.”

The lawyer responded that he wasn’t “able to comment on whether it’s a roadmap,” but “the Supreme Court says you gotta go with the statutes that Congress has passed.”

For their part, a spokesman for Pramaggiore said her team was “pleased” with the 7th Circuit judges’ order and thanked the panel for “moving as swiftly as it did to grant bail.”

“It has never made sense that Anne Pramaggiore has served a single day in prison, much less the three months she has served — for ‘crimes’ the Supreme Court said did not exist,” spokesman Mark Herr said in a statement.

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.

7th Circuit orders release, new trial for two ‘ComEd Four’ defendants

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