Tim Mapes, former chief of staff to former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. Mapes was convicted of perjury for allegedly lying under oath when questioned by federal prosecutors about Madigan’s alleged criminal misconduct.
CHICAGO — A Cook County judge has ruled that Tim Mapes, the convicted chief of staff for former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, cannot get his six-figure state pension back.
Mapes, who for decades served as the right hand for Madigan and also served a stint as the Illinois Democratic Party’s executive director, filed a lawsuit in August 2025 in Cook County Circuit Court alleging the State Employees Retirement System and its board wrongly stripped him of his pension after he was convicted of perjury for allegedly attempting to obstruct federal criminal proceedings against his former boss.
SERS had acted at the recommendation of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and Comptroller Susana Mendoza, who both agreed Mapes forfeited his pension. In an opinion filed in late July, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Donnelly affirmed the system’s decision.
“Public employment may enable an employee’s crimes even after they have left the job,” Donnelly wrote, pointing to a 2006 Illinois First District Appellate Court opinion, Bauer v. State Employee’s Retirement System of Illinois. “An employee still forfeits his pension when he commits a crime sufficiently related to his past government job. Thus, an employee who left the job and contacted a former coworker to sabotage an ongoing investigation properly forfeits their pension because the former employment enabled the crime.”
Donnelly clarified that people on a public pension can commit crimes that don’t trigger a forfeiture and said Mapes’ argument was essentially that SERS didn’t adequately link the perjury to his state job. But the system said Mapes’ tenure as chief of staff is what put him in position to lie such that perjury was on the table. Donnelly also said he was reviewing the original evidence — “Mapes’ indictment, his conviction and the attorney general’s opinion” — and not SERS’ findings.
The indictment includes allegations based on when Mapes testified before a grand jury. In isolation, Donnelly wrote, the testimony isn’t enough because it has insufficient specifics about a prosecutor’s questions regarding Mapes’ “discussions” with Madigan and another key aide, Michael McClain, from 2017 through 2019, which could’ve been germane to SERS’ position or as benign as covering the weather or a golf game.
“The indictment, however, explains why Mapes’ conversations with McClain mattered,” Donnelly wrote. Because a jury trial led to a conviction, he said, Mapes can’t contest the indictment’s allegations, which included that McClain wanted “to obtain for others private jobs, contracts and monetary payments in order to influence and reward (Madigan) in connection” with his role as speaker.
U.S. District Judge John Kness, who presided over Madigan’s federal trial, said Mapes’ role as chief of staff meant “he could reasonably have understood what ‘doing work’ or ‘assignments’ would mean” to Madigan as relates to the federal bribery investigation. Kness found that Mapes’ public employment caused the conversation which gave rise to his perjury and obstruction.
Kness further noted evidence McClain spoke to Mapes after Mapes’ resignation as chief of staff to discuss things like the House and its members, enhancing the connection to his public employment.
“Mapes’ party job, party membership and friendship also caused these conversations,” Donnelly wrote, “but his government job need not be the sole proximate cause.”
Donnelly affirmed the SERS trustee’s final administrative decision.
Mapes was a senior aide for Madigan starting in 1985 and chief of staff from 1992 to 2018. From 1998-2018, while Illinois Democrats made Madigan chairman of the state party, they also selected Mapes to serve as executive director. He resigned both roles in 2018 after a female former House staffer accused Mapes of sexual harassment. Amid the investigation into those allegations, Mapes was accused of regularly yelling at House staffers and others and threatening their jobs. Those who attempted to resist allegedly faced retribution from Madigan's political operatives in attempts to discredit them for standing up to Mapes or others in Madigan’s circle.
In February 2025 a federal jury convicted Madigan of using the power and influence accumulated through four decades at the top of Illinois politics to solicit and accept bribes in the form of favors, jobs and other benefits for those in his political operation from electrical utility ComEd.
Mapes has been represented in the pension appeal action by attorneys Andrew C. Porter and Sarah L. Bakker, of the firm of Salvatore Prescott Porter & Porter, of Evanston.
