SEANC: Proposal was not bribery

An attorney for a state workers' group said a proposal to drop a lawsuit was not bribery.

At a hearing in Wake County Superior Court this morning, John K. Wiles argued that an attorney for the State Employees Association of North Carolina was not trying to bribe an attorney for Richard Moore when he said it would drop a lawsuit if Moore backed a bill.

Wiles argued that the proposal was standard "political bargaining." He said that kind of back-and-forth is "goes on all the time" in a democracy.

"It's messy, but we happen to think it's the best way to run a country," he said. "It's a lot better than what's going on in Iraq, where people shoot each other to settle things."

Wiles said the offer was not a bribe, since Moore's support of the bill would not be part of his "official duties" as state treasurer. He also argued that while such support would not have been a likely outcome of the trial, it was still a legitimate bargaining chip.

"It's simply a bargain for resolution in a civil lawsuit," he said. "Lawsuits are settled all the time on terms that neither party could have gotten if they had pursued the lawsuit all the way to final judgment."