Former Illinois senator to remain in custody prior to sentencing

Former state senator and gubernatorial candidate William "Sam" McCann will remain in custody at the Macon County Jail while he awaits sentencing, as a federal judge denied a oral motion to allow him to be released to home confinement.

U.S. Central District of Illinois Judge Colleen Lawless said during a hearing Friday that she remained concerned McCann would not abide by any ruling of home confinement and felt it appropriate to keep him detained while he awaits a June 20 sentencing.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Bass, leading the prosecution against McCann in his trial on wire fraud, money laundering and tax evasion charges, showed the court a 13-minute video posted to social media last Friday where McCann said that the government had been "coming after him with a pack of lies" in their case against him.

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At that time, McCann was still representing himself pro se and was driving to a hearing on violations of his probation after he was released from a St. Louis area hospital last Wednesday. McCann compared the situation he was in regarding his criminal trial to "being in the old Soviet Union" and said that the federal government was only interested in a story of corruption against him rather than getting to the truth.

McCann also made several accusations relating to his political career in the video, saying that officials in former Gov. Bruce Rauner's administration told him that they could end their conflict if he just voted in lockstep with him and that during his third-party run for governor in 2018, a group of business leaders offered him hundreds of thousands of dollars to drop out of the race, which he rejected.

He said that FBI agents did not care about those allegations, which he compared to the actions of one of the men he faced in the 2018 general election, Democrat and eventual winner JB Pritzker, who was accused of removing toilets in his home to reduce the value and get a reduction on his property taxes.

Pritzker did reimburse the Cook County Treasurer's Office for the incident, but McCann said in the video that the lack of criminal inquiry showed that who you knew and how much money you had dictated the balance of justice in Illinois and nationwide.

"It really doesn't matter about truth, justice and the American way," McCann said. "It's whatever those who have the power deem the future to be. It's very Orwellian and we're allowing it to happen to ourselves."

Later, he accused the federal government of garnishing his wages and said that he had "paid every dime of taxes and then some." He said that the extent of his payments was enough that his family was struggling to make ends meet, even though he was serving in the Illinois Senate.

"They would sweep every dime out of our personal accounts," McCann said. "They are indicting me because they say I was hiding money in a bank account that my wife and mother-in-law set up. Most of the money that was put in there was money that the taxes had already been paid on. The only reason we did it was because we literally could not go to the grocery store. We could not make our house payment because the federal government was taking every single dime we had."

He ended the video by saying that he loved his children and his family and said that his case was an example of a "deep-state, Orwellian" society that would not be fixed in thousands of years unless people fought to make it right.

Bass said the video showed he was lying to the court when he said that he couldn't remember driving to the hearing last Friday, stating that McCann looked to be in good mental and physical shape during the video, something that he noticed during the three-day trial that ended on Thursday with McCann's guilty plea.

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McCann's defense counsel, Jason Vincent, said that his client didn't have any recollection of making the video or what he wore on that Friday morning. He said that he didn't understand how it could be a kind of continuation of the hearing from last Friday – which also dealt with him being detained – following the trial.

Lawless largely agreed with the AUSA, saying that she felt it necessary last week to revoke pre-trial release due to the violations, which she called an "escalation" of his defiance of those orders. She said that she was concerned about the video, saying that his words sounded like a man who could harm himself in the future.

As a result, McCann will remain held until his sentencing, slated for 10 a.m. on June 20.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Former state senator McCann to remain in custody prior to sentencing