Despite a request from Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) for state and/or federal investigators to look into South Carolina Senate nominee Alvin Greene’s (D) mysterious campaign, the chair of the state Democratic party says she’s not ready to call the cops just yet.
On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Clyburn said he asked Fowler to get law enforcement involved in what he says appears to be an attempt by someone to subvert the electoral process by planting Greene in the Senate race. I called Fowler this evening and asked her what she planned to do next. She told me that state party attorneys are looking into Greene, but until they find something she won’t be calling the law.
“I think that to get law enforcement involved you have to have some evidence that something has gone wrong,” she told me. “A lot of people have suspicions but there is no evidence yet of wrongdoing.”
Fowler has already called on Greene to step down from the nomination he won by a landslide Tuesday seemingly from nowhere. Greene took home 60% of the vote in the Democratic primary, despite having done no campaigning anyone can verify or seemingly spending a single dime beyond the state’s required $10,000 filing fee.
The state party has come under fire for allowing Greene into the race. Some have suggested that the party should have done a better job vetting Greene before accepting his check and allowing him to be a Democratic candidate. Fowler said she had no choice but to allow the eccentric Army vet to run when he asked.
“We are required by law to let people file [to run],” Fowler said. “He was old enough to serve, he was a registered voter and he was a resident of South Carolina so I had to let him file.
Fowler told me she called for Greene to get out of the race because of the legal trouble he’s already in, not because it’s clear he did anything wrong as a candidate. Clyburn, on the other hand, says that finding out whether Greene did anything illegal on the campaign trail is a job for law enforcement, and has called on the US Attorney or state investigators to get on the case.
“I don’t think it’s incumbent upon me to run the investigation,” Clyburn told me on the conference call today when I asked what specific evidence he has that Greene is a plant. “We are just bringing this to the attention of law enforcement to let them do their jobs.”
For her part, Fowler said if her team does find any evidence that backs up the suspicions about Greene, she’ll be among the first to call in the folks with the badges.
“If my attorneys say it’s time to go to law enforcement, we will,” she said.
But don’t hold your breath, she warned — the state party’s internal investigation will likely take time.
“In my experience, anything that has to with legal stuff takes longer than you thought,” she said when I asked when she expects the state party’s attorneys to be done with their report.”
Fowler made it clear she’d prefer to put the Greene saga behind her, but she said she will proceed as her attorneys advise.
“I would just as soon skip the drama,” she said. “We have a lot of good Democratic candidates running this year, and all anyone wants to talk about is this guy.”
