Possible ComEd 4 retrial up in the air months after 7th Circuit ordered prison release for 2

CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors on Thursday told a judge they aren’t yet ready to say whether they’ll retry the lead defendants in the “ComEd Four” case who were convicted in 2023 of bribing former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

But U.S. District Judge Manish Shah asked the parties to be ready for a possible retrial early next year.

“I want you to be thinking about February 2027,” he said during a brief hearing.

Thursday morning’s hearing comes four months after a seismic shift in the case when, just hours after hearing appellate arguments, the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the release from prison of longtime Springfield lobbyist Mike McClain and former Commonwealth Edison CEO Anne Pramaggiore. The other half of the ComEd Four did not appeal their convictions but had already finished their own monthslong sentences by then.

In June, the three-judge panel issued a full opinion in the case ruling the feds are free to retry McClain and Pramaggiore. The opinion made clear the government had presented “significant and compelling evidence in the case,” rejecting defendants’ arguments for full acquittal.

“Do not misread our opinion. 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,” Judge Thomas Kirsch II, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote for the panel.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur on Thursday told Shah it’s too early to commit to a retrial and asked to convene again in late October, which would give Pramaggiore’s new lawyers two months to catch up on the case.

Pramaggiore has a new legal team as of Monday when the change of representation was logged in the case docket. After nearly six years, former U.S. Attorney Scott Lassar is off the case and has been replaced by T. Markus Funk, a former federal prosecutor who worked on a major Chicago mob case in the early 2000s. Attorney Carolyn Gurland, who helped represent former Govs. George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich in their own corruption cases, and former Department of Justice criminal chief Brent Wible have also been retained.

Funk told Shah that an early 2027 retrial date would be “ambitious,” saying he’d just received 5 million documents in the case this week.

“It’s difficult to see how we could be prepared at this point,” he said of Shah’s proposed February scheduling.

Patrick Cotter, who represented McClain both during the ComEd Four trial and alongside Madigan in a separate trial that ended with the jury deadlocked on all six charges involving McClain, told Shah he’d retired and his involvement in the case going forward would only be a “cameo.”

A retrial is far from certain, given the resources involved in getting a major case in front of a jury; the original 2023 trial lasted seven weeks and MacArthur told Shah it would take the government “four to six weeks” to present its case.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has seen massive turnover since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, including the departures of two lead attorneys on Madigan-related cases: former Assistant U.S. Attorneys Amarjeet Bhachu and Sarah Streicker.

The office has also faced major scrutiny in the last year over its decisions to pursue charges stemming from Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign in the Chicago area.

In the wake of revelations of prosecutorial misconduct in the “Broadview Six” immigration protest case this spring, MacArthur was assigned to multiple cases that had fallen apart in the aftermath. In early June, U.S. District Judge Mary Roland remarked the veteran prosecutor’s involvement in the cases was tantamount to cleanup duty.

“I understand why the office is assigning you to these cases, frankly, and why I’m sure you’ve taken them on,” she told MacArthur during a June 9 hearing. “The front office, as you know, has created a credibility crisis. And that’s a real problem.”

Instead of proceeding to retrial, the government could offer a plea deal on some of the smaller counts or a deferred prosecution agreement — a fate granted to former AT&T Illinois President Paul LaSchiazza, whose own trial on charges he’d attempted to bribe Madigan in a similar manner to ComEd defendants ended in a deadlocked jury. Before a planned January 2026 retrial, he agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement last fall.

But if prosecutors do stage a ComEd Four retrial, the charges would be significantly pared down. In the years since Pramaggiore and McClain were convicted, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two rulings affecting the case. A 2024 opinion narrowed the federal bribery statute, which led Shah to toss the bribery charges in the case and offer a new trial, which prosecutors at the time did not go for, instead dismissing the bribery charges at sentencing.

And in a 2025 decision in the government’s case against former Chicago Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson for lying to bank regulators, the high court unanimously ruled that the law doesn’t criminalize statements that are misleading but not false. Prosecutors would likely have to refine the books and records charges against Pramaggiore and McClain, as ComEd’s internal records did not require the names of subcontractors, making it easier to hide the fact that the utility funneled $1.3 million to a handful of Madigan allies over a period of eight years despite them doing little to no work for their monthly checks.

On Thursday, Shah approved the government handing over to defense attorneys the years-old grand jury transcripts involving discussion of the books and records charges.

But the judge noted the U.S. Supreme Court may soon weigh in on another matter that could affect the ComEd Four case. Last month Madigan filed an official intention to appeal to the high court after losing at the 7^th Circuit this spring. If the court decided to take up the case, Shah said it would be “useful to know” before parties begin diving into proposed jury instructions, on which both legal strategy and future appeals rest heavily.

In October, Madigan reported to a West Virginia federal prison to begin serving his own 7 ½-year sentence on bribery and other related convictions.

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.

Hannah Meisel

Statehouse & Chicago ReporterHannah has been covering Illinois government and politics since 2014, and since then has worked for a variety of outlets from NPR affiliate stations to a startup newsletter. She’s a graduate of both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U of I’s Springfield campus, where she received an M.A. through the Public Affairs Reporting program and got her start reporting in the Capitol.