Two former ComEd officials could face trial all over again this February, four years after the feds first told a jury the pair had plotted to illegally influence former Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan.
The case against former ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore and longtime Madigan ally Michael McClain returned to the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Manish Shah on Thursday, for the first time since an appeals court ordered them released from prison and wiped out their 2023 convictions.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur told the judge it still isn’t clear how the case will ultimately be resolved. But she acknowledged, “we are ready to proceed to trial.” And Shah told the lawyers, “I want you to be thinking about February 2027.”
“It’s obviously a case of some vintage,” Shah said. “[It] has been tried before. So in theory, people could get prepared and be ready for it.”
Still, Pramaggiore shook up her defense team this week, enlisting onetime Chicago mob prosecutor T. Markus Funk and others to represent her. Funk told the judge his team has a mountain of evidence to review.
An early 2027 trial could be “difficult,” Funk said. But the judge pressed him and the other lawyers to consider it.
Shah did not set a formal trial date. The lawyers are due back in his courtroom in late October.
But the bottom line is, the feds aren’t dropping the case.
Funk once participated in Chicago’s historic Family Secrets mob prosecution, winning a top Justice Department trial honor in 2008. He later shared book and article credits with U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, before Boutros took office.
Now Funk might help take on the feds in one of the most significant Chicago corruption cases in recent memory — one already dealt a significant blow with the reversal this summer of Pramaggiore’s and McClain’s convictions.
Prosecutors have also dropped a set of bribery charges from the case.
Defense attorneys Patrick Cotter and John Mitchell, who have long represented McClain, also made appearances during Thursday’s status hearing. Cotter told the judge he has retired and his appearance amounted to a “cameo.” Mitchell will lead McClain’s defense, he said.
Meanwhile, MacArthur was joined in court by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Julia Schwartz and Richard Rothblatt. Two prosecutors who helped handle the original trial, Amarjeet Bhachu and Sarah Streicker, left the U.S. attorney’s office last year.
The ComEd conspiracy case dates back to 2020 and ended the record-breaking tenure of Madigan, the nation’s longest-serving state House leader.
Prosecutors say Pramaggiore and McClain — along with former ComEd lobbyist John Hooker and onetime City Club President Jay Doherty — conspired to illegally influence Madigan in a bid to benefit ComEd in Springfield.
Hooker and Doherty were convicted along with Pramaggiore and McClain but did not pursue an appeal.
The utility wound up paying five Madigan allies $1.3 million over eight years through intermediaries, even though they did hardly any work, prosecutors have said.
The conspiracy also involved the retention of the Madigan-aligned Reyes Kurson law firm and an appointment to the ComEd board of directors for businessman Juan Ochoa, according to the feds.
Eight weeks after the allegations appeared in a 2020 grand jury indictment, Madigan was forced to give up the speaker’s gavel in Springfield and soon left office. A grand jury indicted him separately in 2022, and he is now serving a 7 ½-year prison sentence, in part for his role in the scheme.
The 2023 ComEd conspiracy trial featured about 50 witnesses over six weeks. Jurors eventually found Pramaggiore and McClain guilty of one count of conspiracy, as well as four bribery counts and four counts of falsifying ComEd’s books and records.
But the Supreme Court then used an Indiana corruption case in 2024 to limit the feds’ use of a bribery law central to the indictments of Pramaggiore, McClain and Madigan. Because Pramaggiore and McClain went to trial before the high court’s ruling, they wound up on a different legal path than the former speaker.
Madigan went to trial three months after the high court’s ruling. His own appeal has been unsuccessful, so far.
But judges from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struggled this spring to assure themselves that the convictions of Pramaggiore and McClain remained valid after the 2024 Supreme Court ruling. The trial record wasn’t clear.
So they ordered the pair released from prison in April and allowed prosecutors to try again.
“Do not misread our opinion,” the judges wrote in June. “We are not suggesting that Pramaggiore and McClain are innocent, only that their convictions were flawed and that they have a right to see their sentences vacated.”