Amid coronavirus, Peter McCoy to take reins of US Attorney’s office in South Carolina

Charleston attorney and South Carolina Rep. Peter McCoy will take over as interim U.S. Attorney for South Carolina this week, according to sources familiar with the matter.

McCoy’s appointment is the result of a directive late last week by U.S. Attorney General William Barr, the sources said.

The 41-year-old Republican will take over as the two-year FBI investigation into one of the state’s biggest potential white collar fraud cases is ongoing — the probe into the $9 billion failure of a nuclear power project in Fairfield County. Officials from utilities Santee Cooper and the former SCANA, now owned by Dominion Energy, have been under scrutiny by federal authorities.

McCoy was nominated in late February for the post by President Donald Trump.

Under normal circumstances, he would undergo a hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee and have his name forwarded to the full U.S. Senate for a vote. But the threat of the coronavirus pandemic has upended normal Senate procedures and the Justice Department made the decision to install McCoy as interim U.S. Attorney, sources said.

When things get back to normal, McCoy will still need to get Senate approval to become U.S. Attorney without the “interim” tag.

The U.S. Attorney post for South Carolina is one of the state’s premiere legal jobs.

McCoy, who will be the state’s top federal prosecutor, will lead a 150-person office that includes approximately 50 assistant U.S. Attorney prosecutors who handle a wide variety of mostly major criminal cases including white collar fraud, domestic terrorism, in addition to drug, gang, and gun offenses.

The office works with a variety of federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, DEA, IRS and ATF. Federal prosecutors are based Columbia, Charleston, Florence and Greenville.

McCoy sometimes wears a bow tie and once worked as an assistant prosecutor in the state’s 9th Judicial Circuit. He has been in the House of Representatives since 2011, where he has served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He will have to resign his legislative post to assume the interim U.S. Attorney’s position.

After the epic failure of the $9 billion nuclear project in Fairfield County, McCoy served as chairman of a S.C. House committee that investigated what went wrong.

This story was originally published March 29, 2020 at 2:57 PM.