7th Circuit orders release, new trial for two ‘ComEd Four’ defendants
[April 15, 2026]
By Hannah Meisel
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.
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.”
[to top of second column]
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Lobbyist Mike McClain and former Commonwealth Edison CEO Anne
Pramaggiore leave Chicago’s Dirksen Federal Courthouse in July 2025
after both were sentenced to two years in prison in connection to a
bribery scheme centered on former Illinois House Speaker Michael
Madigan. (Capitol News Illinois photos by Andrew Adams)
“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.
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