Scoppe: ‘We did nothing wrong,’ and other whoppers

EARLIER THIS month, Sen. Vincent Sheheen sent out a news release demanding to know of Rep. Nikki Haley, “When will she release her tax returns?” Perhaps he meant to ask when she would release “more of her tax returns,” or when she would allow reporters to have copies of her tax returns, rather than making them take notes at her headquarters. But he didn’t say that, and what he did say was at the very best misleading: Ms. Haley has allowed reporters to look at her tax returns for seven years — since her election to the House — which I think is a reasonable period to cover and which Mr. Sheheen himself had indicated at one point he would consider sufficient .

For all I know, Mr. Sheheen might be making this sort of misleading or even fraudulent charges and claims every day. But with this one pretty blatant exception, the only prevarications we are aware of are Ms. Haley’s, because she’s the one getting significant media coverage. And that coverage reveals no decrease in her comfort level with half-truths and untruths since the primary campaign, when she was bold enough to make several misleading claims during a meeting with our editorial board — something candidates are careful to avoid, because they know we’re going to fact-check what they say. (I’ve reposted my column about that at thestate.com/opextra.)

Now, though, in addition to misleading people about herself (as when she kept insisting that she had always opposed federal stimulus funds, when in fact she voted to pass the House budget that included the money), she’s grown adept at making misleading and fraudulent claims about her opponent.

For example, in her interview earlier this month with WLTX in which she insisted that “we did nothing wrong” even though she had to pay $4,400 in penalties for, among other things, twice filing her tax returns nine months after the extended deadline, Ms. Haley tried to paint Mr. Sheheen as endangering constituents’ privacy. Asked if she would follow his lead and turn over legislative e-mails, she said: “We are going to release the e-mails, but not without turning around and making sure we block out every name, every Social Security number, and do everything we can to protect the citizens of the state. My opponent is abusing the situation by asking for those e-mails. It’s actually a violation of the constituents.”

I think it was perfectly appropriate for Ms. Haley to redact this information, and in fact I think it would have been irresponsible to do otherwise; even if you argue as some reporters do that the legislative loophole doesn’t apply to most e-mails from constituents, the fact is that some voters believe their correspondence with legislators is private — and up until now it always has been.

What’s misleading is Ms. Haley’s suggestion that Mr. Sheheen was pushing her to turn over voters’ personal information. In fact, he had redacted that very same sort of information before releasing his e-mails. Now, he was pressuring her to stop dilly-dallying — but it’s not his fault that she ignored media requests of both candidates and didn’t get started on the redactions until after he had gone through his e-mails and released them.

The day after her WLTX interview, Ms. Haley appeared on Greta Van Sustern’s cable talk show and stepped up her usual attack on Mr. Sheheen for “making $400,000 as a trial lawyer” by calling him “a trial lawyer that makes $400,000 a year off the state.”

It’s pretty audacious, in a state with a median household income of $42,000, for someone who made $196,282 last year to castigate someone else for making $372,509. But the more serious sin here is the total fabrication about where Mr. Sheheen’s money came from.

Contrary to what you’d think if you listened to the Republicans’ drumbeat for Mr. Sheheen to reveal the sources of his income, legislators already have to report all the money they receive from state and local governments. In addition, attorneys must report the money they receive representing clients before the Workers Compensation Commission and other state boards.

As our news department noted on Sunday, last year Mr. Sheheen reported receiving $29,000 in salary and expenses as a senator, and his law firm received $13,000 from the Kershaw County Medical Center, $4,700 from the Cassatt Water Co. and $2,400 from the S.C. Guardian Ad Litem Program. That’s a total of $49,100 “off the state.” I suppose it’s possible that he made money that he didn’t report on his economic disclosure statement — you know, like that $40,000 in consulting fees that Ms. Haley didn’t report from a state government contractor who hired her for her “good contacts.” But since there’s no gray area in state law about reporting government income, I seriously doubt it.

Mr. Sheheen also reported that his law firm made about $170,000 in workers comp fees last year. Now, I would like more details about where the rest of his income came from, and I think he probably could provide them without violating legal ethics, say by telling us how much he received in contingency-fee awards, in retainers, in hourly fees. But it’s more than a little misleading for Ms. Haley to demand more transparency from the candidate who has been far, far more transparent than she has about his income as well as his communications on the taxpayers’ computers and e-mail accounts. Unfortunately, that sort of thing is becoming commonplace.