SC's first female US attorney Sherri Lydon is on the job

Sherri Lydon reported to her Main Street office in Columbia on Friday, spending her first full day on the job as South Carolina's new U.S. attorney and the first woman appointed by a president to hold the state's top federal law enforcement post.

Lydon, 56, formerly a Columbia defense attorney, was sworn in Thursday by U.S. Judge Terry Wooten.

"I'm so excited to be back home," said Lydon, who returns to the office where she started her career as a young assistant federal prosecutor in the 1990s.

The U.S. attorney's office has 140 employees, including 55 lawyers. Two-thirds of the lawyers prosecute crimes from public corruption to drug cases and the rest handle federal civil matters.

Lydon's prosecutors work with the FBI, DEA, ATF, Homeland Security and other crime-fighting federal law enforcement agencies. They also work with state and local law enforcement agencies.

Lydon will be briefed on ongoing investigations, including FBI probes into SCANA's V.C. Summer nuclear fiasco and into questionable spending by 5th Circuit Solicitor Dan Johnson.

This story was originally published May 25, 2018 at 1:14 PM with the headline "SC's first female US attorney Sherri Lydon is on the job."