Whoops

It's really hard to deny your former friend wasn't running your bribery operation when he's on thirty or more wiretaps saying so:

• This week began with opening statements in the racketeering conspiracy trial of former Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, whose attorneys insisted that no one had the right to speak for the speaker — that Madigan was “ignorant” of what people said behind his back.

  But it ended with prosecutors playing a crush of about 30 recordings that suggest otherwise: That Madigan’s longtime friend Michael McClain went straight from retiring as a lobbyist in late 2016 to doing “assignments” for Madigan — what a prosecutor called his “dirty work.”

  “This is no longer me talking,” McClain told a veteran lawmaker in one such recording from 2018. “I’m an agent.”

The defense of course, attacked the way the tapes were made, not even bothering to deny the message. They're hope is that everyone knows and accepts that Illinois is perhaps the most crooked state in the union, and that's just how business gets done here. 

The fact that Madigan and his cronies got rich is just happenstance. It could have happened to anyone!