Famously shrewd, Michael Madigan has been indicted. But what did he actually say on tape?
CHICAGO — The long-awaited racketeering indictment of Michael Madigan runs some 106 pages, but anyone looking for a quote directly from the former House speaker’s mouth will have to wade through more than half the document before finding one.
On May 16, 2018, Madigan called his longtime confidant Michael McClain and told him “go forward with” a plan to have former McPier boss Juan Ochoa appointed to the Commonwealth Edison board of directors, according to the indictment filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court.
That first direct line from Madigan is followed by many others that are equally opaque, with the speaker quoted multiple times saying variations of phrases like “Okay, alright, very good” or using carefully couched language such as, “You were contemplating processing something. You should go ahead and process that.”
In the annals of Chicago political corruption cases, they aren’t exactly Blagojevich-esque moments, such as the infamous recorded call where the then-sitting governor of Illinois said of a U.S. Senate seat appointment that was his to make: “I’ve got this
