A 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals order to release former Commonwealth Edison CEO Anne Pramaggiore and longtime Springfield lobbyist Michael McClain from prison came as a surprise to many. We too were taken aback, we confess, at the speed at which the three-judge panel moved.
Just hours after the conclusion of their Tuesday hearing on Pramaggiore and McClain’s appeals, they sprung the two from the federal prisons that had held them for more than three months. Both were serving two-year prison sentences.
But we were far less surprised that the appellate judges ordered new trials for these two of the so-called ComEd Four defendants found guilty in 2023 of conspiring to bribe then-House Speaker Michael Madigan in order to win highly lucrative state legislation for ComEd and its corporate parent Exelon. The other two defendants, former ComEd lobbyists John Hooker and Jay Doherty, didn’t appeal and now are serving the remainder of their time in halfway houses.
In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court upended prosecutors’ interpretation of federal law used to convict the ComEd Four. The high court’s ruling in a separate case involving former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder effectively required an explicit quid-pro-quo arrangement to find an officeholder guilty of bribery, as the ComEd Four were.
Also separately found guilty of bribery, by the way, was Madigan himself, who’s serving a 7.5-year sentence in federal prison and has appealed his 2025 conviction. This ruling may well portend a new trial for Madigan as well.
Which in part is why Andrew Boutros, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, quickly ought to green-light a retrial of Pramaggiore and McClain.
For better or for worse, the Supreme Court has clarified how — and how not — to prosecute public officials caught corruptly conspiring with favor-granting and clout-heavy players, as ComEd was during that era. Best to test out now what sort of evidence and trial approach will be convincing to a jury faced with complex public-corruption charges in this new legal landscape.
With all the focus on the legal back-and-forth since the bombshell trials of the ComEd Four and Madigan, it’s worth remembering the facts of the conspiracy at the root of Madigan’s downfall. For years, ComEd served as a hiring repository for Madigan favorites, helping to satisfy Madigan’s payroller needs after the courts made it far harder to use public offices for that purpose.
Though it was and is a private corporation, as a public utility ComEd was the next best thing to a government office for the care and feeding of Madigan’s patronage army. As a monopoly provider of electricity in northern Illinois, ComEd was supremely reliant on the state for its financial fortunes. Its rates were (and are) subject to approval by the Illinois Commerce Commission. And, when the regulators didn’t give ComEd what it wanted, it simply went over the ICC’s heads to the legislature.
That’s where Madigan came in.
Under Pramaggiore’s leadership, ComEd leaped at the chance to win over the all-powerful speaker, who for many years before had been neutral to negative on the utility’s influence in Springfield, and he reciprocated. Among many other favors, ComEd provided no-work jobs to several of Madigan’s most valued political soldiers, doling out a total of $1.3 million to five men over an eight-year period, evidence in the trial showed. Pramaggiore was convicted of seeking to hide the existence of those lobbying contracts with the Madigan hires from financial and human-resources employees within ComEd.
Over the course of seven years, Madigan was instrumental in a string of remarkable legislative triumphs in Springfield for ComEd. They included passage of a 2011 law that rubber-stamped a massive capital spending program and paved the way for near-automated rate hikes to cover the costs and boost ComEd’s profits.
More Top Picks Bread Maker
They also included a highly lucrative 2016 bailout of several nuclear power plants owned at the time by ComEd parent Exelon. The value of the 2016 Future Energy Jobs Act to ComEd and Exelon was in the billions, evidence showed.
And who paid for all this largesse? Those who use electricity. That is to say, all of us.
This is the sort of conduct that any person on the street would recognize as corrupt to the core.
Whichever ways the judicial winds blow, Madigan’s unholy alliance with ComEd is a scandal that takes its place among the worst in the lengthy and disgraceful pantheon of political corruption in Illinois.
Let’s see this case retried under the justices’ new rules. And, if a new jury concludes that Pramaggiore and McClain didn’t break federal law as so interpreted, then Congress must amend the law to make future such conduct illegal.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].