‘You had a choice to make’: Defense paints cooperating witness in ComEd
trial as opportunistic
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[April 01, 2023]
By HANNAH MEISEL
Capitol News Illinois
hmeisel@capitolnewsillinois.com
CHICAGO – About an hour before sunrise on a mid-January morning in 2019,
two FBI agents arrived at the home of Fidel Marquez’s mother, where the
longtime executive of Commonwealth Edison had been staying.
The agents played a series of recordings of wiretapped phone calls for
Marquez, featuring Marquez himself. When other people in the house began
waking up, the agents took him to a nearby strip mall parking lot to
continue talking.
Over the course of two hours, the agents laid out the government’s
theory that Marquez and his colleagues at ComEd had committed bribery by
giving jobs and contracts to allies of powerful Illinois House Speaker
Michael Madigan in exchange for the speaker’s help with the utility’s
legislative priorities in Springfield.
As the sun rose on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2019, Marquez grew “scared,”
according to both his own testimony in front of a federal jury this week
and one of the agents, who took the stand earlier this month. And by the
end of those two hours, without first consulting a lawyer or any family
members, Marquez agreed to become a cooperating witness in the
government’s case. He would spend the next several months with his cell
phone consensually wiretapped, arranging a series of meetings with his
colleagues while wearing a hidden camera.
Four years later, with the eyes of his four ex-colleagues boring into
him from their seats as defendants in a federal courtroom in Chicago, a
defense attorney for ComEd’s former top contract lobbyist accused
Marquez of choosing to save his own skin – despite not believing he and
his associates did anything wrong.
“You had a choice to make,” Patrick Cotter, an attorney for Mike
McClain, told Marquez as he neared his 20th hour on the witness stand
Thursday afternoon. “You could either plead guilty …or you could have a
seat over here."
As he made his point, Cotter pointed to McClain and his codefendants,
ex-ComEd lobbyists John Hooker and Jay Doherty, and the utility’s former
CEO Anne Pramaggiore.
“So you made a different choice, didn’t you?” Cotter asked, his voice
rising, to which Marquez responded, “correct.”
“You decided to become their worker,” Cotter said of the feds. “Take
meetings when they wanted you to take meetings…Tell lies when they
wanted you to tell lies. And you’ve done that for the last four years.”
Cotter noted that for the first year of Marquez’s cooperation with the
government, he still insisted he had not done anything criminal,
attempting to paint his eventual guilty plea in September 2020 as a
purely opportunistic move to avoid prison time.
“You understood that if you persisted in saying you were innocent, you
could be criminally charged and potentially face 30 years in prison,”
Cotter said.
Marquez responded with the exact maximum prison sentence: “405 months,”
which is “33 years and five months,” Marquez offered.
“You remember,” Cotter replied. “And you remember because it’s important
to you.…that’s why you’re sitting where you’re sitting.”
Cotter reminded the jury that FBI agents did not record their initial
two-hour conversation with Marquez.
“By the end of that two hours, you had decided, without consulting with
anybody on the planet except possibly the two FBI agents, that you were
going to cooperate with the government and…(wear) a recording device and
(record) your friends and co-workers, right?” Cotter asked Marquez.
“Yes,” Marquez responded.
Earlier in the day, Cotter sought to weaken the government’s bribery
case, which ties the jobs and contracts for Madigan allies directly to
the utility’s legislative victories. He reframed McClain’s constant
emails seeking assistance for job placement and following up on contract
proposals as relationship maintenance with the speaker.
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The Dirksen Courthouse is pictured in
Chicago. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Hannah Meisel)
And Cotter pointed to the extensive lobbying efforts that went into both
passing ComEd’s legislative priorities and defeating bills the utility
feared would undermine its goals.
In early 2017, for example, a pair of democratic lawmakers had filed
companion bills that ComEd believed would undo some of the wins included
in the massive Future Energy Jobs Act passed after nearly two years of
effort in December 2016.
Cotter showed the jury a series of emails involving McClain, Marquez,
Hooker and others within ComEd, detailing what would become a
multi-pronged plan to defeat the legislation. He then showed an internal
spreadsheet showing ComEd’s budget for legislative strategy in 2017:
$2,067,789.
Asked if that figure was unusually high, Marquez said it was less in
some years.
“But never less than a million?” Cotter asked, to which Marquez replied
“no.”
The next year, ComEd was worried about a bill pushed by Madigan’s
daughter, then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The bill would have
offered more breaks to low-income customers, but the utility viewed it
as a cost shift for their other customers.
Using another series of emails and a wiretapped call, Cotter attempted
to demonstrate just how much muscle ComEd was putting into its
legislative strategy to defeat the bill, which they worried was picking
up traction in the spring of 2018. Part of the worry was that Lisa
Madigan was pushing the bill in her final year as attorney general, and
outgoing politicians are often given help on “legacy” legislation.
“We’ve got to pull out all of the stops,” McClain told Marquez and
Pramaggiore in that recorded call, noting Lisa Madigan’s team had been
“working this pretty well and…have momentum behind it.”
McClain laid out another multi-pronged plan to activate ComEd’s allies
in labor, mayors in ComEd’s territory, the utility’s vendors, large
customers, faith leaders, and key members of the legislature to turn the
tide on the bill. McClain also insinuated that Madigan had given his
blessing to kill the bill a month earlier but one of the utility’s top
lobbyists had squandered the opportunity, allowing its popularity to
grow – especially within the legislature’s powerful Black Caucus.
Cotter on Thursday asked Marquez whether the level of strategy and
detail put into defeating Lisa Madigan’s bill in 2018 was really
necessary if, as the government alleges, ComEd had been bribing the
speaker.
“At any point in this conversation, did Mike (McClain) say, ‘I’ll just
go to the speaker because he owes us and he’ll pull it’?” Cotter asked.
Marquez confirmed that no, McClain did not suggest that route.
“Mike suggested a very sophisticated and extensive strategy of bringing
in all the resources that ComEd could muster to try to lobby and defeat
this bill,” Cotter said.
“Correct,” Marquez replied.
“And the bill was eventually defeated,” Cotter said, to which Marquez
agreed: “Yes it was.”
“So the strategy worked,” Cotter offered.
Marquez again confirmed.
“Yes it did,” he said.
The trial continues at 11 a.m. on Monday.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news
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