Pearce campaign demands legal fees
Attorneys for GOP candidate for governor threaten to seek additional fees if secretary of state doesn’t pay by July
Attorneys for Republican gubernatorial candidate and U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce demanded payment Thursday of over $133,000 in outstanding courtordered legal fees stemming from a lawsuit that Pearce filed against the New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office last year and won.
The attorneys threatened additional legal action that could cost the state more money if they don’t receive payment by July.
“Frankly, we settled this case in principle in December, and there’s just been no movement towards getting an actual paycheck cut to us,” attorney Carter B. Harrison IV said in a telephone interview.
“We understand, obviously, that the
state has processes that take a while, but it seems like there aren’t any wheels moving on the other side,” he added.
“Obviously, we need this. We’re in a live election campaign, and this money needs to come to us soon or it’s not going to have any value.”
The demand for payment comes just two days after the New Mexico Board of Finance shot down a request for emergency funding from Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver to pay for what she said was her office’s share of the attorneys’ fees.
She said her agency, along with the state Attorney General’s Office and the 5th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, also named in the lawsuit, agreed to pay about $133,000 in legal fees. The District Attorney’s Office would pay 10 percent, she said, and the Secretary of State’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office would split the remainder.
Members of the board who voted against the request, including Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, said it didn’t meet the criteria of an emergency and instead advised Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, to seek a supplemental appropriation from the state Legislature during the next legislative session, which starts two months after the November general election.
But in a strongly worded, fourpage letter addressed to lawyers in the Attorney General’s Office, Harrison said time is of the essence.
“It was explicitly acknowledged … at the point of settlement that payment must be received in advance of election day 2018 to be of any use whatsoever to our clients,” wrote Harrison, of the Albuquerquebased law firm Peifer, Hanson & Mullins.
James Hallinan, a spokesman for Attorney General Hector Balderas, criticized the letter in an email to on Thursday.
“It’s shameful that Steve Pearce wants New Mexico taxpayers to pay his high-priced attorneys $134,000 to further his political career while New Mexico families are struggling just to get by,” he said.
The Attorney General’s Office is not expected to pay the full amount of the fees, he said, adding that it has no interest in the lawsuit but “was simply fulfilling its statutory obligation to represent the Secretary of State and the district attorney.”
In a subsequent email, Hallinan raised questions about fee agreement — and who is responsible for paying.
“There have been no decisions about the split,” he said, “but it will be New Mexico taxpayers who pay Steve Pearce’s political bill.”
The Secretary of State’s Office did not return a request for comment on Hallinan’s statement.
Pearce, who has represented New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District since 2011 and has amassed a sizable congressional campaign war chest, sued Toulouse Oliver after she told him that state law prohibited him from transferring more than $900,000 left in his federal campaign account to his campaign for governor.
Toulouse Oliver said that under state law, Pearce could transfer only the maximum amount allowed for any donation from one political committee to another, or $11,000 total.
It was an opinion shared by attorneys for Toulouse Oliver’s predecessor, Republican Brad Winter.
“Although [the Federal Election Campaign Act] permits the transfer of funds from a FECA candidate campaign committee to a local candidate’s campaign committee, any transfer is first subject to the restrictions of FECA, and then subject to the limits found within respective state or local laws,” Winter’s attorneys said in April 2016.
Pearce, however, disagreed with Toulouse Oliver’s interpretation and sued. A federal judge ruled in Pearce’s favor, saying the New Mexico law was unconstitutional “on the basis of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution,” Toulouse Oliver said at Tuesday’s Board of Finance meeting.
Rather than continue to litigate the matter, the parties settled. The agreement included the $133,000 in legal fees, which reflected a 15 percent discount.
“We ultimately agreed to settle the fees at 85 percent … and an explicit condition of that agreement — and the major incentive for us to take a reduced amount via settlement rather than seeking the full amount from the court — was that your clients would ‘make payment as expeditiously as reasonably possible,’ ” Harrison’s letter says.
The Board of Finance, which previously had approved a request for funding for attorneys’ fees from the state Public Education Department, voted 5-2 to reject the request from Toulouse Oliver, who said she would follow their advice and seek funding from the Legislature.
Pearce’s attorneys said the request would be too late.
“We need to receive an immediate, firm commitment from you regarding the dates by which the attorneys’ fees and costs that your clients owe to ours will be paid,” Harrison wrote in the letter.
“If you do not get back to us by June 25 with a July date by which you promise that you will have a check to us (or multiple checks, if you intend to split the payment) totaling $133,032.15, then we will file a fee petition with the court seeking 100 percent of our attorneys’ fees and costs up to and including the date of the hearing on that petition — a figure we estimate will be north of $180,000,” the letter states.
Joey Keefe, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office, said Toulouse Oliver doesn’t know what she’s going to do.
“We will have a conversation with the other parties involved in the case to decide our next steps,” Keefe said in an email.
Andrea Goff, a senior adviser to Pearce, said the outstanding legal fees go against the campaign’s budget.
“To not know whether we’re going to have anywhere between $130,000 to $180,000 in our account is a massive issue when we’re 137 days from an election,” she said.
“It absolutely is an urgency,” Goff added. “It is not a wildfire, and I get that, but it absolutely is an urgency.
“Frankly, it’s also irresponsible,” she said.
“The state owes the money. They should pay what they owe. They were going to get it at a discount — not sure that they are now — and it’s not fair to play to Russian roulette with taxpayers’ money.”