SC Ethics law allows campaigning on your dime
July 31, 2007 | Filed Under Presidential, State Politics, The Chaser, Thomas Ravenel, Top Shelf News
Written by The Shot
The Attorney for the SC Ethics Commission has said that the law governing state employees use of time and equipment for campaign purposes specifically excludes Federal elections.
This comes as quite a suprise, nevertheless, it has effectively cleared Scott Malyerck, one of Thomas Ravenel’s chief advisors, from any wrong doing when he used state computers to communicate with Ravenel about the goings on of the Guiliani Campaign.
My guess is this loophole gets closed pretty quickly. Not that political staffers don’t bend the rules on this anyway, but the wording of the law if puzzling. Why would you exempt any type of campaigning in the first place?
Check out the AP story below.
S.C. Ethics Commission lawyer says state employees can work on federal campaigns on the job
By JIM DAVENPORT Associated Press Writer
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) _ South Carolina law may allow state workers to use taxpayer computers and time to promote presidential campaigns, a state Ethics Commission lawyer said.
The comments from commission general counsel Cathy Hazelwood came after an Associated Press review of e-mails that showed former state Treasurer Thomas Ravenel exchanged messages promoting Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani during office hours. Ravenel resigned last week following a federal cocaine charge.
”I think an argument can be made that it is an unwise use of time; however, campaign practices specifically excludes federal candidates,” Hazelwood wrote in an e-mail to the AP.
Between February and April, treasurer’s office spokesman Scott Malyerck e-mailed Ravenel at least six times during office hours regarding the former New York Mayor’s campaign. Malyerck has maintained he did nothing wrong by forwarding messages to Ravenel, who served as Giuliani’s South Carolina campaign chairman until the unrelated indictment June 19.
Since the Malyerck-Ravenel e-mails were made public, interim Treasurer Ken Wingate has met with Malyerck and said office computers can’t be used for campaign purposes.
Gov. Mark Sanford’s spokesman Joel Sawyer also said state workers shouldn’t use taxpayer time or computers to promote any candidate.
The Ethics commission has never addressed the issue, Hazelwood said. When asked if the law was flawed, Hazelwood said it could be a potential loophole.
That’s not what the Legislature had in mind in writing the law, said Republican state House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Harrison. He said the Judiciary Committee would talk with Hazelwood and draft any needed legislation.
”I can’t imagine any legislative intent that would treat a federal election any different than a state election,” he said.
Malyerck said Tuesday that he would like to see the law cleared up, too.
”Let’s change it,” Malyerck said. ”I want to lead the charge.”
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…”Sarah,” a former white-collar worker at a major Peninsula employer, recalls stopping by an after-hours party not long ago to sober up. Collapsing on a large coach with some friends and acquaintances, she looked around and saw just how prevalent cocaine was in the Charleston party scene.
“Each person on the sofa had their own bag of coke,” she says.
In June, local millionaire developer and recently-elected State Treasurer Thomas Ravenel was indicted on charges that he distributed cocaine to his friends. It would be tragic if it wasn’t so darn familiar. Ravenel’s story mirrors a cocaine bust involving three Charleston attorneys in 2004 that was bizarrely linked to accusations of cocaine use by Charleston professionals more than 15 years earlier.
Coke in Charleston isn’t exclusively a white-collar problem, but they’re the more elusive users, says Charleston Police spokesman Charles Francis.
“It’s hard to find who they are,” he says. “They aren’t going to go on the street corner to buy it. They have a friend of a friend with a connection.”
Federal prosecutors have kept the details of Ravenel’s bust under wraps, citing an ongoing investigation, leaving many a socialite to speculate who among Charleston’s elite will be the next guest at a resort/rehab clinic.
Three years ago, Assistant Solicitor Damon Cook and defense lawyers Tara Anderson Thompson and Todd Anthony Strich pleaded guilty to cocaine distribution. Like Ravenel, the three lawyers were not accused of selling the drug, just passing it around, putting them somewhere between dealers and philanthropists. They each received probation for the offense, but Thompson is serving five years in prison for her role in an unrelated drug trafficking case.
This wasn’t Thompson’s first time in the news regarding the local drug scene. In 1988, she accused Circuit Judge Larry Richter of offering her cocaine at a party. Richter has denied the allegations and was never charged with a crime.
In 2005, Thompson told the Post and Courier that, “after practicing law for 17 years, what I’ve seen and the criminals I’ve represented … I realized it was commonplace, and it was commonplace in Charleston.”