U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., at a Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025, Senate hearing regarding legislative oversight of the South Carolina attorney general's office. (Photo by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace continues to blast South Carolina’s top prosecutor, a chief rival in her bid for governor, by claiming he lets pedophiles go free — an accusation he emphatically denies.
A spokesman for Attorney General Alan Wilson says Mace is totally misrepresenting the data she received from his office through a public records request.
While three other Republicans are vying to replace term-limited Gov. Henry McMaster — Lt. Gov. Pam Evette, state Sen. Josh Kimbrell, and U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman — Mace has focused her public ire on Wilson from the outset. Months before either of them announced their expected bids, the 1st District congresswoman lit into Wilson as a “do-nothing attorney general,” including during her bombshell speech last February on the floor of the U.S. House.
“I will take him out,” she told reporters at a Richland County GOP meeting a year ago. “I will personally make sure that he is never governor of South Carolina.”
She said then that she’d do a better job as governor of prosecuting crime, though that’s not the governor’s job.
Most crimes also aren’t directly prosecuted by the state attorney general. Cases are generally the purview of locally elected solicitors, who are the chief prosecutors for their judicial circuit. Two solicitors are among candidates running to replace Wilson as attorney general: 1st Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe and 8th Circuit Solicitor David Stumbo. The other Republican in the race is state Sen. Stephen Goldfinch, the first to announce.
A year ago, Wilson declined to name Mace in his denials, saying he didn’t want to engage. But with less than five months remaining in the race for the GOP nomination, he’s pushing back.
The data Mace cites in her recent accusations involve the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which is overseen by the attorney general’s office. Eight attorneys in his office work with law enforcement across the state to prosecute cybercrimes against children, including the creation and possession of videos showing children being sexually abused.
“What they’ve revealed should outrage every child and parent,” Mace told reporters in Charleston earlier this month about the data she received.
The SC Daily Gazette also received copies of the task force data from 2016 to 2025.
Based on that data, Mace says prosecutors in the state took few pedophiles or child molesters to trial over that period. And in fiscal years 2018, 2021 and 2022, there were zero trials, she said at the news conference, surrounded by a group of mothers.
Most cases were resolved through “plea deals behind closed doors, where the children victims do not get a voice,” Mace continued. “Our children deserve a justice system that fights for them, not one that cuts deals with the monsters who harm them.”
Justin Hall, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said Mace doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
“Congresswoman Mace is drastically mischaracterizing pleas, as she often does on many things related to the work of the Attorney General’s Office and ICAC Task Force,” he told the SC Daily Gazette.
The reason people charged in those cases frequently plead guilty is because the evidence is so overwhelming, he said.
Because the task force focuses on crimes over the internet, there’s usually a substantial digital trail. Rather than go through the humiliation of a public trial, they plead guilty. But that doesn’t mean they’re getting a deal for a more lenient sentence, Hall said.
“The overwhelming majority of ICAC pleas are not plea ‘deals’ but are ‘straight up’ pleas, meaning that they plead guilty to the charges without any negotiations,” he said.
In her public records request last October, Mace asked the attorney general’s office for detailed data on all plea agreements it had reached since 2019 in cases involving exploitation of a minor or distribution of child sexual abuse videos. In a follow-up request last month, she asked for any emails from his office related to a plea agreement, the original charges referred for prosecution, and any charges that were dropped.
In a Jan. 13 email response, the attorney general’s office said compiling all of that information would “effectively shut down” their task force unit for months. It asked her to narrow her request “to a more reasonable scope.” It also noted that much of the information she requested was publicly available through online court records, if Mace wanted to take the time to comb through them.
However, details about plea agreements are exempt from public records requirements, Wilson’s office wrote.
“Alan Wilson says he’s too busy not prosecuting pedophiles to answer questions,” Mace headlined an email the next day.
Last week, during a congressional hearing in Washington involving convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a New York prison in 2019, Mace sought to publicly draw a connection to Wilson. And in her newsletter emailed hours later, she highlighted his response that it would take “thousands of hours” away from prosecuting crimes to provide all the information she sought.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
“Release the Wilson files,” she wrote, mimicking calls for release of all files related to Epstein.
Hall dismissed the slogan as “just more political posturing.”
During her news conference, Mace highlighted a task force case she called an example of the judicial system’s “complete failure.”
In December 2023, Travis Reed Gaye of Mount Pleasant was arrested and charged with seven counts of sexual exploitation of a minor: one second-degree count and six third-degree charges, according to a release from Wilson’s office.
Court records show Gaye pleaded guilty to one count last November. A judge officially sentenced him to 10 years in prison, the maximum, but suspended the prison time for five years of probation. That means he’s supposed to go to prison if he violates his probation, which he quickly did.
Gaye was arrested in December after his probation agent determined he consumed alcohol and viewed or downloaded sexually explicit material — both violations of his probation. Gaye is out on bond awaiting a judge’s decision on what that means for his sentence, according to Scott Hawkins, spokesman for the state agency that oversees people on probation or parole.
Court records show Gaye paid a $15,000 cash bond Dec. 16 and is supposed to be wearing an ankle monitor.
Gaye’s attorney, as listed in court records, did not respond to a phone or email request for comment by the SC Daily Gazette.
Mace characterized that as Wilson’s office dropping six of the seven charges and letting Gaye go free, despite violating his probation.
“Those who abuse children should never be free to begin with,” she said.
Hall says Mace is misunderstanding court records. The count Gaye pleaded guilty to “encompassed the case,” and the task force can’t control a judge’s decision, Hall said.
As for probation violations and what should happen next, the attorney general’s office has no authority over that; that’s the responsibility of the Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services, he added.
Mace also took aim at the number of pending task force cases shown in the annual reports, which she called an “exploding backlog.” According to the data, pending cases nearly tripled from 2016 to 2025, growing from 266 to 773.
In response, Hall said the task force has seen a huge uptick in tips but no proportional increase in staff or resources. The task force received about 9,100 tips in 2023, about 11,500 in 2024, and almost 22,000 in 2025, he said.
Though internet crimes against children can be handled by prosecutors across the state, over 90% of them are prosecuted by the eight attorneys who currently work for the attorney general, according to Hall, who said they have special expertise in handling those kinds of cases.
Wilson asked legislators for money to pay for a ninth attorney with the task force, noting each attorney is handling about 100 cases.
Large case backlogs are a problem for South Carolina in general. The COVID-19 pandemic, when courthouses spent months closed, exacerbated the problem. According to the latest report from the judicial branch, 57,182 criminal cases statewide during the last fiscal year had been pending for at least 545 days.
Two years ago, House Speaker Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, told reporters that at least 11,600 cases statewide involved suspects who were indicted at least three years earlier and still waiting for their day in court.
