Tim Mapes, a key member of Michael Madigan’s inner circle who for years served as the speaker’s borderline-tyrannical gatekeeper, is about to go on trial on perjury charges stemming from his grand jury appearance.
Timothy Mapes, former chief of staff to House Speaker Michael Madigan, departs the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse after a hearing in his federal perjury case on Oct. 13, 2022.
Now, Mapes, a key member of Madigan’s inner circle who for years served as the speaker’s borderline-tyrannical gatekeeper, is about to go on trial himself on perjury charges stemming from his grand jury appearance. His indictment in May 2021 caught many by surprise, particularly since he was granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. attorney’s office and warned by the chief judge before his grand jury testimony that failing to answer truthfully could result in criminal charges against him.Mapes has denied wrongdoing. His attorneys have maintained that federal authorities were attempting to squeeze him to give up information to bolster the prosecution’s case against Madigan.
He spent decades as Madigan’s chief of staff and executive director of the Madigan-run Democratic Party of Illinois. Madigan even anointed Mapes clerk of the House, giving him a trio of powerful positions designed to carry out the will of the nation’s longest-serving speaker.One Democratic operative remembered that Mapes underscored his roles with a sign at his statehouse office that, borrowing from the “Wizard of Oz,” declared: “Nobody gets in to see the wizard. Not nobody, not no how.
The study, led by Maggie Hickey, a former federal prosecutor who is the monitor of the consent decree the Chicago Police Department is now under and who recently investigated allegations of hazing in Northwestern University’s football program, found multiple criticisms of Mapes, including accusations of enforcing unwritten policies he made up on the spot, yelling and cursing, and making “explicit or indirect threats regarding people’s jobs.
At one point, McClain was caught on a recording lamenting how the speaker had delegated so many campaign-related tasks to Mapes over the years and few knew what Mapes did to get things done. Prosecutors played a secretly recorded phone call between McClain and ex-ComEd CEO Anne Pramaggiore, who at the time had been promoted to oversee Exelon, about hiring Mapes in a government affairs role with the utility.
“I liked him. I thought he was really smart,” Pramaggiore testified. “I thought Tim could help put that together for the utility.” It’s a nuance that even the judge recently acknowledged was not your run-of-the-mill perjury prosecution. In the call, Mapes told McClain he’d given the attorney, Sheldon Zenner, the memo per a “request,” and that he was told to “report back in” to McClain, according to recent court filings.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Julia Schwartz said there clearly was “some concern” that the FBI outreach had something to do with the ongoing corruption investigation that was in the news at the time. Kness ruled that the issue was “plainly relevant under the government’s theory” of the case, and that the evidence of Mapes’ outreach to Zenner was fair game.
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