Hannah Meisel
ReporterHannah Meisel is a reporter at Capitol News Illinois.
She’s had a number of assignments covering the Statehouse and Illinois government since the 2014 legislative session, most recently serving as Statehouse editor for NPR Illinois from 2020 until after the November 2022 election. Prior to that, Meisel worked at The Daily Line, Law 360 and Illinois Public Media in addition to various assignments for other outlets.
-
Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday morning in the federal corruption trial of state Sen. Emil Jones III, D-Chicago, who stands accused of accepting alleged bribes from a red-light camera company executive whose cooperation with the feds has also brought down several other Chicago-area politicians. -
The family of an 11-year-old Chicago boy murdered last year by his mother’s ex-boyfriend the day after he was released from prison is suing the state — including the embattled Prisoner Review Board and Illinois Department of Corrections— for negligence. -
A federal judge on Monday granted a partial retrial on several bribery counts in the case of four former executives and lobbyists for electric utility Commonwealth Edison who were convicted in 2023 for their roles in bribing longtime Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. -
Jurors hearing former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s trial are finally scheduled to begin deliberations Wednesday afternoon more than three months after testimony in the case began. -
After Michael Madigan spent several hours facing blistering cross-examination in his federal corruption trial, the former Illinois House speaker on Tuesday made a rare candid remark about the yearslong investigation that landed him on the witness stand in a Chicago courtroom. -
The former speaker’s decision to testify will lengthen the already long trial, which was originally predicted to wrap before Christmas. -
Former state Rep. Eddie Acevedo never had to appear in a federal courtroom between 2021 and 2022 as he was arraigned on tax evasion charges, later pleaded guilty and was then sentenced to six months in prison all via videoconference due to COVID-19. -
After an extraordinarily short day of trial Monday, jurors may only remember one detail: those high up in Gov. JB Pritzker’s 2018 campaign had nicknamed then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan “Sphinx.” -
For the second time in the span of seven months, then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan called up Chicago Ald. Danny Solis after reading about a proposed real estate development in the alderman’s ward. -
Chicago businessman Juan Ochoa had heard little more than crickets in the six months since then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan asked for his resume in November 2017.
