In November, Palmetto State Watch Foundation submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office (SCAG) for the past ten years of Litigation Retention Agreements and financial documents with outside law firms, including those representing political subdivisions for state matters. We have been piecing through the FOIA since we received it in January.

And what we are seeing is shocking. Our findings are enough to warrant multiple articles…

On February 18th, the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office presented its proposed budget in front of the Senate Constitutional Budget Subcommittee, in which two out of the five members have been recipients of class action opioid settlement funds as a result of their relationship with the Attorney General’s office during their tenure in the legislature.

Of interest currently are the law firms of Democrat State Senators Brad Hutto and Margie Bright Matthews, who were among those listed as recipients of settlement funds for litigating political subdivisions with the SCAG’s office for the South Carolina Opioid Recovery Act several times over the past four years. Both Senators sit on the Senate Constitutional Budget Subcommittee and are slated to vote whether or not to give SCAG’s proposed budget a favorable report.

Senator Margie Bright Matthews’s law firm, Bright Matthews Law Firm, LLC, which according to Facebook, focuses on criminal law, has been compensated for sitting in on multiple class action lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors with the SCAG’s office between 2023 and 2025 and has received approximately $23,334.30 in attorney fees.

Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto’s law firm, Williams & Williams, signed onto the same lawsuits with Bright Matthews, however, Williams & Williams made slightly more money, raking in approximately $123,964.77 on behalf of the local political subdivisions he represented.

In a November 6, 2025 hearing, the public waited with bated breath as the Senators questioned the Attorney General. Instead of investigating the “numerous credible allegations” against Wilson’s office, the Senate Oversight Committee treated the SCAG’s office with “kid gloves” as noted by FITSNews in its report.

There was even a reported whistleblower willing to testify to many of these allegations that allegedly met with at least one Senator of the committee, but was never mentioned during the hearing itself, with one comment overheard that someone must have gotten paid off. Would being on the short list of lawyer-legislators who received cuts of the SC opioid settlements explain why Senator Brad Hutto was so generous to Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Alan Wilson during the Senate Oversight Committee when tasked with investigating the office?

The first payment from these settlements was issued in January of 2023, with payments throughout 2024 and 2025. According to South Carolina Code 8-13-700 & 8-13-710, legislators are required to abstain from voting on matters with which they, or business associates, are receiving financial remuneration. Though the Attorney General’s office is not responsible for paying these settlement funds, as they were paid by the pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors, one could argue that the opportunity to receive those funds arose because of actions taken by the Attorney General’s office, and as such, there might be opportunity to influence the present.

Is a legislator’s receipt of court-approved contingency fees from opioid litigation an “interest which may be affected by action of the governmental entity” with which the legislator is associated? We argue that these (and other) legislators have a financial interest that could be affected by legislative action.

According to vote records for the line items, more than one Senator whose law firm received these settlements that were made possible because of the large class action opioid lawsuits filed by SCAG failed to abstain from voting on the Attorney General’s budget within a year of receiving said funds.

To make matters more incestous, both Matthews and Hutto sit on the Senate Ethics Committee. You would expect role model behavior when filing Statements of Economic Interests, yet they never reported receiving the thousands of dollars from these settlements. Check out PDF versions of their Statements of Economic Interest HERE. The last section, “additional interests”, is where one might expect to find these disclosures…

The same lawyers that received settlement funds because of their relationship with the Attorney General’s Office get to decide how much taxpayer money the SCAG’s office gets for its budget. Does that seem like a conflict of interest to you?

Article posted with permission from Palmetto State Watch Foundation