Feds accuse ex-lawmaker of ‘greed, fraud and arrogance’ in misusing campaign funds
After week of delays, former GOP State Sen. Sam McCann’s trial finally underway
SPRINGFIELD (Capitol News Illinois) – Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Bass pulled no punches in describing former Republican state Sen. Sam McCann on the first day of his federal corruption trial on Tuesday.
“This case is about greed, fraud and arrogance,” Bass said. “Greed for a lifestyle far beyond his means…fraud in obtaining that lifestyle…and arrogance in continuing that lifestyle (even after being) confronted by law enforcement.”
McCann stands accused of illegally using campaign funds for personal expenses, including paying two mortgages, financing multiple vehicles and vacations, fraudulently cutting himself checks for work not performed, and double-dipping on reimbursement for miles driven.
The trial finally got underway Tuesday morning after a week of delays stemming from McCann’s sudden hospitalization the previous weekend. U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless ordered him arrested and detained last Friday for violating her direct orders to communicate with the federal probation office after being discharged from the hospital.
Read more: Former lawmaker taken into custody amid delays to his corruption trial after sudden hospitalization
McCann appeared in court in the black and gray striped uniform from the Macon County Jail, where he’s been held since Friday, along with orange sandals. At the defense table, McCann sat in a wheelchair – a repeat of Monday, when he claimed to be suffering from confusion and memory loss from not receiving his medication for several days – a claim prosecutors disputed.
Lawless delayed the trial one more day until Tuesday after McCann said he no longer wanted to represent himself – a reversal of a move that won him a 10-week delay in November when he suddenly fired his court-appointed attorneys. On Tuesday he was represented by his court-appointed attorney Jason Vincent, who had previously served as his standby counsel.
Read more: McCann trial delayed another day as he cancels plan to represent himself
McCann waived his right to a trial by jury in the fall, so Bass on Monday presented his first seven witnesses to Lawless. They included McCann’s former running mate in his 2018 campaign for governor and a former staffer who said she had an “on and off” romantic relationship with McCann from 2011 to 2017.
Cynthia Miller, who started working for McCann during his 2010 run for a seat in the Illinois Senate, said that over the nearly eight years she spent staffing his campaigns and district office, her relationship with McCann became “toxic.”
She attributed that toxicity to her increasing knowledge that the senator was misspending campaign funds and McCann’s anger in response to her multiple confrontations about it. In the early years that Miller was in charge of filing McCann’s quarterly campaign finance reports to the State Board of Elections, she said she kept meticulous receipts.
But after the campaign got debit cards, it became harder to keep track of McCann’s spending, which complicated the pair’s personal relationship.
“‘You don’t need to worry about it, I’ll worry about it,’” Miller quoted McCann as saying when she brought up his questionable spending.
Miller told Bass that around 2012 or 2013, McCann punished her for questioning some of his campaign expenses. She said the senator “became very angry” and went to her apartment in Jacksonville to take the computer and printer that she used to maintain the campaign’s finances.
But that temporary reprieve from filing quarterly reports didn’t last forever. Miller said McCann asked her to help with campaign finance again, and she’d resumed her occasional warnings that it “wasn’t right” to claim mileage reimbursements from the campaign fund when she knew he was using the campaign debit card to pay for fuel.
Eventually, Miller settled on only inputting expenses into the quarterly reports she knew were legitimate and left it to McCann to input expenses she wasn’t sure about. Miller said she didn’t feel comfortable putting her name down on official Board of Elections paperwork as the “preparer” of quarterly reports that included questionable expenses.
But in 2016, Miller opened a piece of mail from a bank that wasn’t the institution where McCann’s campaign fund was based. She noticed it was labeled “campaign fund” and guessed the password to the account based on McCann’s reuse of passwords for his banking, email, and Facebook accounts, all of which she had access to as his staffer.
The account, opened in September of that year, included charges to a water park and a jewelry company called Plunder. It also showed a nearly $20,000 charge, which McCann falsely labeled as a purchase for a mobile district office. Miller affirmed McCann never operated a mobile district office, though he’d talked about wanting one in the past.
When Miller asked McCann about it, she said he responded by saying, “The less I knew, the better off I’d be.”
A few months later, McCann fired Miller, but brought her back on in mid-2017, where she remained until ultimately leaving for good in early 2018.
Later that year, McCann left the Republican party and founded the Conservative Party of Illinois in order to run for governor on a third-party platform. His gubernatorial run was primarily funded by $3 million from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, a powerful organized labor organization with an interest in defeating then-Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who’d been elected on the message that unions were to blame for Illinois’ fiscal woes.
On the witness stand Tuesday, Local 150’s executive director, Marc Poulos, told Vincent the union supported McCann because he was a “lunch pail Republican” and that Local 150 leadership “was pleased” with McCann’s performance during the 2018 campaign.
But when Bass asked Poulos if the union would still have been “pleased” with McCann “had you known” how he’d been spending the union’s campaign contributions – which included the purchase of trucks and recreational vehicles in 2018 – Poulos said no.
“We would not have been, nor are we pleased,” he said.
In day 2 of trial, prosecutors detail McCann alleged RV rental scheme
Former GOP Sen. Sam McCann allegedly rented RVs to himself
As federal agents wrapped up their first interview with former Republican State Sen. Sam McCann in the summer of 2018, one observed that there were “a lot of vehicles in your driveway.”
“I gotta have wheels,” McCann told the agents a few moments earlier. “The only shot I got at winning is making personal connections.”
McCann’s words were played back to him in a federal courtroom on Wednesday, the second day of a trial in which he stands accused of misusing campaign funds for personal benefit for years while in office. Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Bass played more than an hour of FBI-recorded tape from that first meeting with agents on July 30, 2018.
Read more: Feds accuse ex-lawmaker of ‘greed, fraud and arrogance’ in misusing campaign funds
The former senator appeared in U.S. District Judge Colleen Lawless’ courtroom again wearing a black and gray striped uniform from Macon County Jail. He’s been held there since Friday, when the judge ordered him detained after he disobeyed direct orders upon his discharge from a sudden hospitalization in St. Louis, which delayed the trial from last week.
Read more: Former lawmaker taken into custody amid delays to his corruption trial after sudden hospitalization
Nearly six years earlier, McCann was in the middle of a third-party campaign for governor at the time the agents approached him. He said he regularly drove 100,000 miles annually in his job as state senator, as his rural district spanned seven counties westward from Springfield to the Missouri border, and the senator said he drove everywhere to connect with constituents and voters.
But the constant driving, McCann told the agents, left him little time to get his campaign finances in order every three months when he was required to file quarterly reports to the Illinois State Board of Elections.
“I’m out on the road all the time,” McCann said after agents relayed that his publicly stated campaign finances were wildly out of whack with his true bank statements, which they’d gained access to in the course of their yearlong investigation. He also lamented that he didn’t have a big campaign team like some others in Illinois politics.
One of the agents told McCann that he was guessing the two balances were “five digits, if not six digits out of balance.”
McCann did not respond when asked how the agents were supposed to reconcile those two numbers, letting the silence grow after he let out a sigh.
There were “a lot of expenses that look like normal consumer expenses,” one of the agents told him.
But when directly asked if any of the expenditures in his campaign account were on “anything that doesn’t have to do with the campaign?” McCann flatly denied it.
“Not that I can think of,” he said.
In fact, prosecutors allege, McCann spent years using his campaign count as a piggy bank for personal use.
Some of the most notable purchases allegedly financed by campaign funds include a truck, an SUV, a trailer, and a motor home.
When agents pointed out, for example, that McCann had “two campaign offices on the same street” in Carlinville – which happened to be McCann’s former residence and an investment property next door – the senator said he was renting the buildings to his campaign, even though he had a much more clearly marked campaign office elsewhere in town.
The agents said it raised a red flag that he was reporting on his quarterly campaign finance paperwork that he was paying “rent” directly to Carlinville National Bank, the same institution that held two of McCann’s mortgages. An executive from CNB testified on Tuesday that the bank had never rented any property to McCann’s campaign, but McCann paid his two mortgages from one check every month, which always bore the name “Sam McCann for Senate” in the top-left corner.
When the agents suggested McCann was using his campaign funds to pay the mortgage on the investment property, the senator said he believed it only paid “a portion of the mortgage.” But agents also pointed out that it was odd that McCann’s campaign was paying CNB directly, and that he wasn’t reporting the rent payments as income; his eventual indictment included charges that he was evading taxes.
Also on Wednesday, prosecutors delved into McCann’s alleged scheme to rent out a motor home and trailer – which they also allege he purchased illegally with campaign funds – to himself on an Airbnb-style website called RV Share.
McCann registered as an owner of the camper vehicles under the name Sam McCann and then made a second account with his given name, William McCann, to rent them. McCann rented out his vehicles five times, including three times to his RV Share alter ego.
Though the physical addresses and email addresses the two accounts used were different, the accounts both used the same phone number, which RV Share executive Tom Klenotic acknowledged should’ve been a red flag to the website.
McCann’s counsel, Jason Vincent, suggested RV Share had a vested interest in overlooking the duplicate phone numbers, as the company made nearly $11,000 in commission from McCann renting out his vehicles on the website.
But Klenotic said RV Share flagged the two accounts for possible fraud anyway and stopped allowing the accounts to perform any transactions.
In response to prosecutors’ subpoena on his company, Klenotic had produced a conversation McCann had with himself on the RV Share platform, in which one McCann wrote to the other to thank him.
“We can’t wait to get on the open road,” the message said.
The government is expected to rest its case on Thursday.
Hannah Meisel is a full-time state government and politics reporter for Capitol News Illinois.
She previously covered state government and politics for NPR Illinois and Illinois Public Radio, The Daily Line, and Law360, as well as a temporary stint for Rich Miller's CapitolFax in 2018.
Hannah also holds a journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a reporter and managing editor at The Daily Illini. After college, she interned at NPR in Washington, D.C.
In 2020, the Washington Post named Hannah one of the best political reporters in Illinois, and in 2021, she won the Illinois News Broadcasters Association's Crystal Mic award for best small market radio reporter in the state. Hannah is a former host of WSEC-TV's weekly political roundtable program CapitolView and makes regular appearances on TV and radio stations across the state in addition to her role as a panelist and producer for NPR Illinois' State Week in Review.
