Report: House Speaker’s Legal Team Tries Some Unusual Tactics

The legal team for Rep. Bobby Harrell (R-Charleston), the powerful S.C. House Speaker facing a state grand jury probe into allegations that he dipped into his campaign fund and abused his office for personal gain, appears to have just hammered its thumb.

But perhaps there’s more to it.

Citing unnamed law enforcement sources, The State’s John Monk reported last week that Harrell’s lawyers have requested a closed hearing with Circuit Judge Robert Hood, who’s been assigned to the state grand jury, to argue that Attorney General Alan Wilson should be removed from the case due to an undisclosed conflict of interest.

Harrell’s attorney said Tuesday it would be inappropriate to comment on the matter, citing state grand jury rules.

Harrell’s office declined to comment.

But Harrell’s critics have pounced on the alleged move as an underhanded, unfounded attempt to reset the board in the House Speaker’s favor, perhaps to line up a less motivated prosecutor.

“Speaker Harrell has taken every opportunity to exert his extraordinary power to receive special treatment,” says Ashley Landess, president of the South Carolina Policy Council, who initially took the complaints about Harrell to Wilson’s office. “He even used his power to push a secret bill through full committee that would have literally decriminalized all the ethics violations of which he is accused.”

Wilson subsequently forwarded the case to SLED for investigation. Since news of Team Harrell’s request for a closed hearing broke, Wilson’s office has stated its opposition to both the hearing and Wilson’s removal.

According to longtime ethics watchdog and attorney John Crangle of Common Cause, the argument to remove Wilson has slim chance of success, given the attorney general’s apparent lack of conflict in the case. But he described a member of Harrell’s counsel, Gedney Howe III, as an “outside-the-box kind of lawyer.”


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