Scoppe: Ultimately, it was Alan Wilson who made sure politics couldn’t trump the law in Harrell case
IT WAS FITTING that Attorney General Alan Wilson was in the courtroom Monday morning when suspended House Speaker Bobby Harrell was arraigned on nine corruption charges. Although Solicitor David Pascoe’s name is on those indictments, the case against one of South Carolina’s most powerful officials would not have made it to court without Mr. Wilson’s persistence.
Mr. Harrell is of course presumed innocent until proven otherwise. But guilty or innocent, the speaker of the House has quite literally been brought to justice. Contrary to the way it looked for a while there, he ultimately was unable to use his considerable political power to quash a criminal investigation and avoid charges.
If he escapes conviction, it will be because the prosecution does not present a sound case against him — not because the state was afraid to investigate him or afraid to charge him or stripped of the power to charge him, and not because his friends in the Legislature were able to rewrite the state’s criminal laws to make what he is alleged to have done legal.
And the person who deserves credit for all of that is Mr. Wilson.
Certainly Mr. Wilson had a great deal of help, from SLED Chief Mark Keel to Solicitor General Bob Cook, Chief Deputy Attorney General John McIntosh and Assistant Deputy Attorneys General Creighton Waters and Allen Myrick to Mr. Pascoe. But at every step of the way, it was Mr. Wilson who had to decide whether to proceed with the case, in the face of a barrage of political attacks and legal roadblocks that no attorney general has faced at least in my memory. And at every step of the way, his choice was to proceed.
That’s not to say he handled this case perfectly. Far from it. A combination of obvious mistakes and decisions that looked smart at the time but in retrospect turned out to be unwise opened the door to months of legal and political gyrations that undermined public confidence in our judicial system and nearly brought the investigation to a premature conclusion.
Mr. Wilson’s first mistake came on Oct. 9, 2012, after the S.C. Policy Council, Common Cause and other groups called on him to request a SLED investigation of Mr. Harrell’s campaign spending. In response, he released a statement saying that would be premature.
It probably was premature at that point, less than a month after The Post and Courier of Charleston reported that the speaker had reimbursed himself for hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign expenses, most with only the sketchiest of details; at that point, the focus was more on the lack of detail than on the expenditures themselves. But Mr. Wilson went on to say that the matter needed to be reviewed first by the House Ethics Committee.
It seemed pretty clear that the rookie attorney general was trying to get himself out of an uncomfortable political position: He didn’t want to be seen as covering up for a fellow Republican officeholder, but he also didn’t have any desire to launch an investigation against one of the most powerful members of his own party. But that statement, implying that he lacked the legal authority to investigate, would become fodder for intensive efforts by both Mr. Harrell and Circuit Judge Casey Manning to strip the attorney general of his constitutional authority to investigate the speaker.
The attorney general’s other mistake came in April 2013, when he met privately with Mr. Harrell’s chief of staff to discuss a provision he wanted added to the ethics bill whose direction Mr. Harrell controlled. Brad Wright testified in Judge Manning’s courtroom this spring that Mr. Wilson pounded on his desk and issued vague threats against the speaker. Mr. Wilson denied that and testified that he met with Mr. Wright because it would have been inappropriate to meet with Mr. Harrell, since by then he had asked for the SLED investigation.
I have no idea what happened in the meeting, and didn’t hear anything in Mr. Wright’s testimony that would have merited removing Mr. Wilson from the case. But that meeting was the basis of Mr. Harrell’s motion to remove Mr. Wilson from the case, and Mr. Wilson opened the door to that effort by having it with no witnesses present. And it was that motion that Judge Manning used to try to shut down the grand jury investigation.
Beyond those two mistakes, Mr. Wilson complicated this case by doing precisely the types of things that previous attorneys general have done in high-profile cases: issuing brief statements announcing that he had 1) asked SLED to investigate, 2) received the SLED investigative report and 3) launched a State Grand Jury investigation.
I think those announcements did a good job of balancing the secrecy of the State Grand Jury and the rights of investigative targets on the one hand against the public’s right to know that its attorney general wasn’t sweeping a possible corruption case under the rug, and that its speaker of the House was in fact under investigation. But they also gave Mr. Harrell a clear target and gave Judge Manning a clear target and gave Chief Justice Jean Toal a target when she went on and on in court (erroneously) about how unprecedented it was for an attorney general to announce that he had turned a case over to the grand jury. And all of that raised troubling questions about the impartiality of the judicial system.
Those announcements also gave the Supreme Court the opportunity to write its infamous footnote directing Judge Manning to shut the public out of the wrestling match between the attorney general and the speaker of the House. Now, footnotes are not supposed to carry any legal weight, and I’m still trying to find a legal basis for this one, but in this case it clearly did carry legal weight, and you can bet it will continue to do so in the future. That’s not a good thing, but I don’t see how Mr. Wilson could have been expected to foresee that — or what he could have done to avoid it even if he had seen it coming.
When Mr. Wilson first ran for attorney general four years ago, he was woefully young and inexperienced. Yes, he seemed to have good judgment, but his limited legal resume, combined with the complete absence of a political resume, left me with serious concerns about how he would perform under pressure. Less than two years into the job, he was thrust into the most pressurized position a South Carolina attorney general has faced in decades.
I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point Mr. Wilson grew into this job, and in some ways, I think he has Mr. Harrell to thank for that: The more Mr. Harrell and his allies threw at him, it seemed, the more determined he became to see this case through.
Whatever the outcome of the Harrell trial, I think we ought to be grateful for the tenacity Mr. Wilson has demonstrated. It’s not something we see often enough in elected officials.
This story was originally published September 30, 2014 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Scoppe: Ultimately, it was Alan Wilson who made sure politics couldn’t trump the law in Harrell case."