Newsweek<\/em> declared Haley \u201cthe face of the New South,\u201d Newt Gingrich wondered, \u201ccould you pick a more perfect symbol of change?\u201d Even Democratic apparatchik Neera Tanden declared that, as an Indian American herself, she was \u201cproud of [Haley\u2019s] accomplishment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n State Government, Sold \u2014 To the CEO in the Back<\/h2>\n \n Sanford left his successor a mess. State lawmakers had spent the 2000s bingeing on tax cuts, and Haley was walking into the governor\u2019s mansion during the hangover.<\/p>\n
When the 2008 financial crisis sent hardship soaring, increasing South Carolina\u2019s public assistance rolls, the state faced a budget shortfall of more than $800 million. Everything from colleges and welfare to the agency in charge of maintaining state-owned office buildings was looking at deep cuts, after having already drastically reduced services. The state\u2019s Department of Health and Human Services \u2014 its Medicaid program \u2014 alone faced a whopping $228 million deficit despite scaling back services.<\/p>\n
What was Haley\u2019s solution to this desperate crisis? To double down on everything that had caused it.<\/p>\n
First, she set about directly handing the reins of government over to big business \u2014 or, in her words, to those who \u201cunderstand that time is money\u201d and \u201cknow what it\u2019s like to be on the other side of the red tape.\u201d During the campaign, Haley had organized meetings to reassure local business leaders; they\u2019d been so fed up with the gridlock caused by Sanford\u2019s rocky relationship with the legislature that the state\u2019s Chamber of Commerce \u2014 which Haley had earlier labeled a \u201cbig fan of bailouts and corporate welfare\u201d \u2014 had endorsed Sheheen, her centrist Democrat opponent. Now, she was making good on those assurances.<\/p>\n
Haley stocked her fourteen-member transition team with business leaders who picked others like them to head departments overseeing everything from insurance to revenue: an ex-BMW executive, a former Royal Bank of Canada CEO, a seasoned manufacturing industry CFO, and a Morgan Stanley principal, to name a few. She shunted all but one person off the Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), in charge of environmental protection, and put largely businesspeople in their place.<\/p>\n
A previously wary corporate world began bombarding Haley with generosity. Within months of taking office, her campaign had raised $50,000 from business interests, while another $700,000 flowed into the inauguration fund; seventy-nine of its eighty-six donors were businesses, many of them part of the very industries being regulated by the agencies Haley was busy appointing. It wouldn\u2019t have been right to use tax money for the festivities, her spokesman explained.<\/p>\n
Haley would never again have trouble raising money like she did during that first campaign, spending the rest of her tenure zipping around the country for fundraisers, breaking state campaign haul records, and easily outpacing all rivals. When she ran for reelection in 2014 against Sheheen, whom she had barely beaten in 2010, she at first outraised him by 70 percent, then more than double, then nearly triple. The state\u2019s Chamber of Commerce switched its allegiance to her, as businesses effectively became her most enthusiastic and reliable base.<\/p>\nHaley’s benefactors showered her personally with expensive gifts \u2014 jewelry, art, concert tickets, trips, ritzy accommodations \u2014 that reached their highest volume as she soaked up national publicity in her final year.<\/q><\/aside>\nName a big corporation or a Forbes<\/em>-listed billionaire, and it\u2019s likely that, between her 2010 win and 2016 exit, their money slithered over to Haley at some point: to her campaign coffers, to her charitable foundation, to the political organization she\u2019d founded to push her causes and candidates, or to her leadership PAC, all of which received a seemingly constant stream of largesse from a who\u2019s who of powerful interests. That included Walmart, Verizon, Koch, Adelson \u2014 even then\u2013reality TV star Donald Trump, who must\u2019ve seen something in the young Republican, donating to both of her gubernatorial campaigns as well as her advocacy organization. When they weren\u2019t doing that, they showered her personally with expensive gifts \u2014 jewelry, art, concert tickets, trips, ritzy accommodations \u2014 that reached their highest volume as she soaked up national publicity in her final year.<\/p>\nIt was good to give. One campaign donor, private prison operator GEO Group, was in the mix when Haley considered privatizing state mental health services, despite the company\u2019s history of being sued over inmate deaths and mistreatment. Another donor, the American Insurance Association, saw its longest-serving head lobbyist picked to run South Carolina\u2019s insurance department, despite one witness at his confirmation hearing warning that the industry was targeting the state as a \u201choney hole\u201d because of its lax regulations.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, the money chasing got Haley in hot water. In November 2011, only two weeks after raising $15,000 at a Georgia fundraiser hosted by a well-connected state Republican who sat on the RGA\u2019s finance committee, Haley intervened in a DHEC decision rejecting the state\u2019s permit application to dredge the Savannah River over water quality concerns. Georgia\u2019s governor had asked her to get him a hearing with the DHEC board, which she appointed, and soon the decision was reversed.<\/p>\nNikki Haley speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2013, as governor. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nThe whole incident became a full-blown scandal, further fueled by Haley and her staffers\u2019 refusal to cooperate with an official inquiry into the matter, necessitating subpoenas. More than anything, it was simply a bad idea \u201con every single level \u2014 environmental, competition wise, expansion, the cost,\u201d as one Republican lawmaker put it, to the point that the House voted unanimously to disapprove of the move.<\/p>\n
The Senate ultimately undid the permit, but only by overriding Haley\u2019s veto first. \u201cWhy the governor persists in being the sole person in the state of South Carolina who is intent on helping Georgia gain an advantage over South Carolina is baffling,\u201d said another Republican. Despite the optics, Haley went back to the Peach State for another lavish fundraiser a few years later.<\/p>\n
She drew another round of bad headlines in 2015, when in her quest to create a \u201cbusiness-friendly\u201d DHEC, Haley nominated as its chief Eleanor Kitzman, an insurance industry executive and former Goldman Sachs lobbyist. Kitzman was a rare triple threat: a donor, fundraiser host, and personal friend of Haley. Within days, as senators questioned Kitzman\u2019s lack of experience and background in the field, the fact that she was the only candidate considered for the position, and that she\u2019d been put forward after telling Haley privately that she was looking for a job, Kitzman withdrew. One newspaper called it \u201ca \u2018how-to\u2019 manual on bad governance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Homicide by Budget Cut<\/h2>\n \n Next, Haley embarked on a program of pitiless austerity that she claimed would turn around the state\u2019s economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cNearly two years ago, the federal government in Washington decided to transfer its irresponsible fiscal practices to the states. And our state, just like every other, accepted it,\u201d she said ominously in her inaugural address. \u201cWhen we produce this year’s budget, we will see the heavy price for having done so.\u201d<\/p>\n
With Haley\u2019s veto hanging over the process, legislators crafted a budget in her first year that slashed $5.2 billion from state spending, largely targeting welfare, Medicaid, public schools, and colleges, while tapping into unused reserves to help fill any fiscal holes left over \u2014 all for the sake of clinging to the $3.7 billion worth of sales and service tax breaks the state had enacted in previous years. \u201cWe could not raise any tax,\u201d said Republican Dan Cooper, the House Ways and Means chair at the time, noting that there was nowhere near the two-thirds majority needed to override a potential Haley veto of a tax hike.<\/p>\n
In fact, within months, Haley would sign another<\/em> tax cut: this time for real estate, citing \u201ca problem with second home ownership that was starting to fall terribly\u201d and the need to get business activity and \u201cthe real estate market across the state churning again.\u201d A year later came a two-point small business income tax cut that lowered the rate to 3 percent. For the rest of her tenure, not a year went by that Haley didn\u2019t propose massive tax cuts as the cure for the already revenue-starved state\u2019s ills, whether phasing out the corporate tax entirely as she\u2019d campaigned on, or merging South Carolina\u2019s seven personal tax brackets into three. Another Republican, then\u2013Senate finance chair Hugh Leatherman, criticized her for trying to \u201cdo tax relief to build a political resume.\u201d<\/p>\nThe other part of that resume was Haley\u2019s chief executive role, as she saw it, to \u201chold everything down [so] we are not running deficits.\u201d Almost no program was immune for those five years to Haley\u2019s veto pen or the cost cutters she\u2019d put in charge of her administration. Arts, parks, seniors, homeless youth, raises for teachers, HIV and AIDS prevention, disabled services, rape crisis centers \u2014 all of them and many more were deemed unworthy of public investment by Haley over the course of six budgets, and only some of them were saved by a GOP-dominated legislature determinedly overriding her vetoes.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we saw was the rebirth of earmarks,\u201d she said as she vetoed $100,000 for a playground for kids with disabilities. \u201cIt is not for state tax dollars to go to. Let the taxpayers decide if they want to give to a playground.\u201d<\/p>\nHaley embarked on a program of pitiless austerity that she claimed would turn around the state\u2019s economy.<\/q><\/aside>\nAt a time when South Carolina\u2019s unemployment was consistently among the country\u2019s highest, and in a state where more than four in five taxpayers reported income less than $50,000, the brunt of Haley\u2019s cuts often fell on the jobless and poor. South Carolina\u2019s welfare agency faced $5 million in cuts, and Haley imposed a further $7 million by completing Sanford\u2019s plan to pare down the already paltry family welfare payment of $270 a month \u2014 already a fraction of the poverty line \u2014 by a fifth.<\/p>\n
Her attacks on the jobless seemed especially petty, given the state\u2019s 10 percent unemployment rate when she took office, and the fact that many of South Carolina\u2019s unemployed had, like their counterparts across the country, been pushed out of work by a global recession. Haley chopped jobless benefits from twenty-six to twenty weeks, limited them for seasonal workers, and stripped South Carolinians of up to seventeen weeks of the federal extended benefits they\u2019d been granted under the Obama stimulus law. For good measure, Haley undermined another stimulus provision meant to help people cope with the crisis, ignoring its work requirement waiver for food stamps and slapping the requirement on anyway.<\/p>\n
Two years later, citing \u201cfoot traffic,\u201d Haley\u2019s administration closed in-person, one-on-one unemployment services in seventeen rural counties with high jobless rates, seven of them among the state\u2019s ten worst for unemployment. The eight positions eliminated in the process saved around $400,000, yet legislators couldn\u2019t help but notice the agency had simultaneously given nearly seventy other employees raises totaling nearly $440,000. In the ensuing controversy, the agency\u2019s director \u2014 a board member on one of Haley\u2019s political organizations \u2014 resigned, now firmly a pattern in Haley\u2019s governorship.<\/p>\n
The tragic consequences of South Carolina\u2019s many years of austerity became manifest in 2014, when several child deaths under the state Department of Social Services\u2019s (DSS) watch triggered a sprawling scandal that threatened Haley\u2019s reelection. While she was boasting about how many people her DSS \u2014 meant to be responsible for the well-being of vulnerable children \u2014 had shifted off welfare rolls\u00a0 (\u201cwe take care of children in lots of ways,\u201d she gushed), it soon turned out the agency had failed to report more than 150 deaths of children and wildly misled federal authorities about both its shortage of caseworkers and the absurd number of cases that each handled.<\/p>\n
In the face of mounting calls for Lillian Koller, Haley\u2019s pick to run the agency, to step aside, Haley implacably defended Koller, even after she became yet another appointee to resign. The DSS had closed a $28 million deficit and moved more than 20,000 people from the welfare rolls into jobs, Haley insisted, and she remained \u201cproud of Lillian, the work she’s done at DSS, and most of all, that I can call her my friend.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rot went deeper. Not only was the agency chronically underfunded and overburdened, with state government warned as recently as 2006 that caseloads were too high, but the decision under Haley to outsource the handling of child abuse cases to contractors two years prior had been a shocking failure. An audit found that the agency\u2019s investigations into child abuse complaints dropped 34 percent after taking up the outsourcing, while the number of kids that were subsequently abused in their families more than doubled when they were assigned to contractors.<\/p>\n
Haley\u2019s competence as a manager was widely questioned. But she sailed to victory a month later anyway, in an election that saw the lowest voter turnout in four decades and every incumbent keep their seat. Her winning margin had actually widened since 2010.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Medicaid, Medican\u2019t<\/h2>\n \n As the parade of brutal cost cutting marched on, Haley rejected what should have been an elegant solution to both the budget crisis and the recession-era hardships endured by South Carolinians.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will not expand Medicaid on President Obama\u2019s watch. We will not expand Medicaid ever,\u201d she vowed.<\/p>\n
She was referring to one of the virtues of Obama\u2019s largely underwhelming health care law, namely the provision paying for states to make more people eligible for Medicaid \u2014 specifically, anyone making 138 percent of the federal poverty level or less, instead of the 50 percent figure that the state was currently covering. For South Carolina, that would mean adding roughly half a million people to the federal program, making it responsible for insuring a third of the state\u2019s population.<\/p>\n
Contrary to Haley\u2019s claims that adopting it would \u201cbust our budget,\u201d the expansion was a good deal for South Carolina. The federal government would pick up the full tab for the first three years, then gradually lower its share of the cost burden to a still hefty 90 percent by 2020, where it would stay indefinitely. At one point, Haley badly garbled these details to an audience, claiming the federal government\u2019s share for those first three years was only 90 percent, after which point it would stop paying altogether \u2014 suggesting she either hadn\u2019t bothered to brush up on the policy she was vehemently opposing, or was cynically lying about it.<\/p>\nNikki Haley visits Marion County, South Carolina, after Hurricane Matthew. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nWhy would someone in Haley\u2019s position oppose this? For one, besides the chilling prospect of headlines declaring Haley had taken federal money, Obamacare in general had become a poster child for \u201cbig government\u201d overreach in the eyes of the GOP establishment and the Tea Party. And Haley had already started building a national brand opposing the law, traveling to Washington before she was sworn in to tell GOP leaders that \u201cwe need you to help us fight these mandates like health care.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emails later showed that, as they fought Obamacare, Haley and her team were intensely concerned about the political optics. \u201cThey\u2019re not looking at the merits of the legislation and whether it advances the cause of South Carolinians. They care about \u2018whose side we appear to be on\u2019 and keeping an arm\u2019s length from anything to do with the Affordable Care Act,\u201d was how a disappointed Frank Knapp, president of the state\u2019s Small Business Chamber of Commerce, summed it up. \u201cThey’re still running a campaign.”<\/p>\n
There were also the governor\u2019s ties to the insurance industry. In 2010, insurance interests had given Haley three times what they\u2019d given Sheheen, while health insurers like BlueCross BlueShield had also donated to her inaugural fund. In turn, Haley had made several industry-backed appointments, including former insurance agent Tim Scott, whom Haley appointed a US senator in 2012.<\/p>\n
Haley spent the next five years resisting Obamacare\u2019s successful implementation in the state, including by stubbornly refusing to enact the Medicaid expansion despite the obvious, dire need.<\/p>\n
More than 800,000 South Carolinians were already benefiting from the law\u2019s provisions in Haley\u2019s first term, like those letting young adults stay on their parents\u2019 insurance plans, and nearly 19 percent \u2014 more than a million \u2014 were uninsured in 2011, facing the abyss of potential medical catastrophe. In a state where 16 percent lived below the poverty line, the downturn and years of budget cuts, Haley\u2019s included, threatened the chronically ill and disabled who relied on government programs to stay alive and healthy, while the state\u2019s dying hospitals resorted to layoffs and hiring freezes in the face of dwindling patients. Some simply filed for bankruptcy or closed.<\/p>\nBy the time Haley left office, South Carolina’s health care conditions were dismal.<\/q><\/aside>\nAs time went on, Haley\u2019s opposition to Medicaid expansion made less and less sense. One by one, other Republican governors went along with the policy, while more and more voices within the state clamored for it: hospitals, newspapers, majorities of older residents, and voters more generally \u2014 even the state\u2019s Chamber of Commerce, whose president warned that the foot dragging hurt businesses, including via a $2,000-per-worker fine for large firms in states that refused expansion. Studies and analyses tipped expansion to create 44,000 jobs, boost GDP 1 percent, bring $16 billion into the state, add $9 million worth of tax revenue, and provide a lifeline for the state\u2019s cash-strapped hospitals.<\/p>\n
It was all in line with Haley\u2019s ethos of fiscal responsibility, economic growth, and job creation. Still she refused. Headlines showed the human cost of her obstinance: an uninsured flu patient left with an $800,000 medical bill; hundreds queueing for hours at a free two-day dental clinic; a pizza delivery man, dead from cancer, who had delayed seeing a doctor after falling into the infamous coverage gap, one of 123,000 South Carolina adults in the same position.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not as if there weren\u2019t alternatives that could have alleviated some of this suffering \u2014 Haley just dogmatically rejected them all. As she planned out her painful first term cuts, hospitals offered to voluntarily pay higher fees to the state Medicaid system to fix the budget crunch; no, said Haley, because that was technically a tax and would be \u201cimmoral.\u201d When a bipartisan group of senators suggested using government funds to help the working poor buy private<\/em> insurance in the federal health care marketplace, as other red states had done, Haley declined; the idea was a backdoor to a mandate in the style of Obamacare, which, lest anyone forget, was \u201ca budget-busting, job-killing disaster.\u201d<\/p>\nBy the time she left office, the state\u2019s health care conditions were dismal. Anywhere between 10 to 12.3 percent still lacked health insurance, one of the worst rates in the country, and with one of the lowest rates of public health spending, South Carolina led most of the nation on metric after metric that no one wants to lead in, from infant mortality and premature death to diabetes and lack of dentists. Ranked the ninth most unhealthy state in 2016 by the United Health Foundation, it had barely budged from the sixth place it had recorded in Haley\u2019s first year. South Carolina remains one of only ten states that have still not expanded Medicaid.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Union-Buster-in-Chief<\/h2>\n \n It wasn\u2019t just the poor, uninsured, or unemployed. Anyone could be sacrificed so Haley could claim she hadn\u2019t hiked taxes or taken part in a \u201cbailout\u201d \u2014 including those who had a job.<\/p>\n
Leading the five-member State Budget and Control Board (SBCB) \u2014 a powerful entity unique to South Carolina that is responsible for setting government policy and administration \u2014 Haley took aim at teachers and other government workers, cutting cost-of-living raises for retirees and repeatedly hiking their health insurance premiums, after workers had already had to eat more than a decade of premium hikes. It was a nuisance for workers, but proved a boon for Haley donor BlueCross BlueShield, which happened to administer the state employee health plan.<\/p>\n
Particularly outrageous was when she raised those premiums a second time in 2012, further fattening her own corporate donor\u2019s profits with worker pay. The move was entirely unnecessary: lawmakers had specifically budgeted that year so state employees wouldn\u2019t have to face another premium hike, part of a delicate budget deal that Haley had already signed into law. But Haley persuaded two other SBCB members to overrule them, infuriating Republican leadership. A year later, the state Supreme Court ruled the board had been in the wrong, undoing the hike. Haley insisted she had simply been \u201cmaking a statement for the taxpayers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAsk anybody in the private sector if they get the benefits that state employees get, because they don\u2019t,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd ask anyone in the private sector if they have the extra money to pay for state employees to have benefits. They don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
You didn\u2019t have to read between the lines to sense a quiet antipathy for workers in Haley\u2019s words and deeds, one that often took the form of a virulent opposition to labor unions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no secret I don\u2019t like the unions,\u201d Haley once said. \u201cWe are a right-to-work state. I will do everything I can to defend the fact we are a right-to-work state.\u201d<\/p>\nAnyone could be sacrificed so Haley could claim she hadn\u2019t hiked taxes or taken part in a \u2018bailout\u2019 \u2014 including those who had a job.<\/q><\/aside>\nShe made that dislike vocally clear wherever she could: at Tea Party rallies, at her annual State of the State addresses, at a rotary club visit, at an automotive conference, or while accepting an award at the US Chamber of Commerce, where she vowed to \u201cget rid of the influence that [unions] have on the system.\u201d She discouraged businesses from moving to the state if it meant they\u2019d bring a unionized workforce. \u201cI think they are job killers. If you bring a company to South Carolina, I’ve got your back. I’m not letting [unions] in,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just talk. Haley swiftly appointed to run the state\u2019s labor agency a union-busting lawyer who had attacked United Auto Worker organizing efforts, because \u201cwe’re going to fight the unions and I needed a partner to help me do it,\u201d a remark that earned her a lawsuit from the AFL-CIO. South Carolina law barred striking workers from receiving unemployment benefits, but she signed an executive order to that effect anyway. She endorsed a GOP bill allowing businesses not to notify workers about their rights to unionize, and signed another one forbidding state government entities from making contractors sign agreements with unions for work on public construction projects.<\/p>\n
Haley\u2019s union-busting energy was focused in particular on the International Association of Machinists\u2019s (IAM) efforts to unionize a new Boeing plant in North Charleston. She campaigned relentlessly against the effort, including taking out a radio ad urging Boeing workers in the state not to join. When the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint against the company, charging that it had violated federal law by moving operations from Washington state to anti-union South Carolina, she labeled it a \u201crogue agency\u201d that needed to be disbanded, and organized a press conference at the Chamber of Commerce with other prominent Republicans to call for governors and businesses to work together to combat it. \u201cWhen you go after a corporate citizen in South Carolina, it is personal to me,\u201d Haley said. The NLRB suit would \u201cchill\u201d firms\u2019 ability to expand across state lines or bring jobs stateside, she testified to Congress.<\/p>\n
In the end, Haley got her way: the IAM decided to delay its union vote in 2015, blaming Haley in part for \u201ccreating an atmosphere of state-sanctioned hostility toward unions and union organizers\u201d that had \u201cintimidated workers to the point we don’t believe a free and fair election is possible.\u201d Two years later, when Haley was gone, the union vote was finally held. It failed.<\/p>\n
For Haley, it was part of a race-to-the-bottom vision that put the concerns of big business first, and assumed that allowing them to wring every last drop out of workers was a precondition for creating jobs. The fact that South Carolina was one of the country\u2019s least unionized states \u2014 on the eve of the union vote, the unionization rate was at 2.2 percent of the workforce and dropping \u2014 was \u201can economic development tool unlike any other,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n \u201cWe Did What the Company Asked\u201d<\/h2>\n \n It didn\u2019t hurt that Boeing was a donor, of course, pitching in to both Haley\u2019s campaign and her inauguration. That fact lent an air of impropriety to the $120 million the state borrowed in 2013 to incentivize expansion plans by the company, whose revenue was more than three times the size of the state\u2019s entire budget. Haley signed that measure only two weeks after it was introduced into the Senate, while the SBCB that she led planned to approve an added bridge loan for the firm \u2014 all of which came on top of the nearly $1 billion in tax incentives the state had already thrown at Boeing under her predecessor.<\/p>\n
It likewise added impropriety to Haley\u2019s tireless advocacy on Boeing\u2019s behalf, which at times was closer to that of a company pitchwoman than an elected official. At one point, Haley headlined an aerospace industry expo and declared that \u201cthe reason the state\u2019s aerospace industry is growing is because Boeing is growing.\u201d She was so eager to promote the company, she made up favors she\u2019d done for it, falsely claiming one of her appointees had sped up the permitting process to let its North Charleston plant open six months early. After Haley left office, Boeing made the relationship official, giving her a lucrative seat on its board of directors in 2019.<\/p>\nNikki Haley signing a real estate bill. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBoeing wasn\u2019t the only firm that got plum treatment. \u201cI don’t think you just hand over a check to win someone over. I think you create a business environment that allows them to make money every day,\u201d Haley said of her approach to attracting firms to the state.<\/p>\n
Yet the two often seemed to mean the same thing to her in practice. By her first sixteen months in office, as Haley slashed spending and piled burden after burden on struggling South Carolinians, she had handed out at least $70 million in incentives to various firms. Even Haley\u2019s political allies at the South Carolina Policy Council accused her of corporate welfare that helped only a few at the expense of most of the state\u2019s people \u2014 especially as a Pew Center on the States analysis had found South Carolina was lax in verifying whether the money it poured into these incentives delivered a good return.<\/p>\n
At one point, the state gave $1.2 million to a grifter who vowed to invest $50 million to reopen a closed textile mill in Pee Dee and create hundreds of jobs, but instead spent the money on a luxury SUV and an expensive Palm Beach wedding while wiring hundreds of thousands to a South American bank account. Haley had called the fake plan a \u201cbig win for one of our state\u2019s rural areas\u201d and personally turned up to welcome the fraudster to the state, telling him, \u201cyou are taking a chance on us. . . . We are going to wrap our arms around you.\u201d The whole thing hit the headlines in 2015 when he was indicted on wire fraud changes and, separately, over a $29 million Ponzi scheme.<\/p>\n