- [Kelly] Mark Robinson hires attorneys and says he's fighting back against CNN's investigative reporting into alleged online behavior.

This, as office staff leaks its intention to resign and new pollings coming in.

This is "State Lines".

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[bright music] [bright music continues] - Welcome back to "State Lines", I'm Kelly McCullen.

Great panel to my right today.

Dawn Vaughan joins us, Capital Bureau Chief of the "News and Observer".

WUNC Radio's Capital Bureau Chief, Colin Campbell.

Mitch Kokai, Senior Political Analyst of the John Locke Foundation and let's welcome back Axios Raleigh's political reporter, Lucille Sherman.

So at the Legislative Bureau, some of us have escaped that bureau, Mitch, and some are still stuck there, so, but good to have you back.

Another rock solid week for North Carolina politics.

Mark Robinson's campaign announced this week that it is hiring attorneys to investigate CNN's reporting on internet messages that CNN has attributed to Mr. Robinson.

The Binnall Law Group has been retained to investigate claims made by CNN's KFILE investigative journalism team.

CNN released internet postings of messages its journalists report came from accounts owned by Mark Robinson, the gubernatorial candidate.

The posts feature dates prior to Robinson's election as Lieutenant Governor and Mr. Robinson promised a legal response earlier this week.

- We're not gonna fight that out here because that's what CNN wants us to do.

What we're gonna do is we're gonna reiterate our thoughts again, and we're gonna reiterate what I said in there.

While this country is literally facing a crisis situation on the world stage, while our border is wide open, while our businesses are struggling, while folks are dying from fentanyl, while crime is spiraling out of control, you folks wanna focus on tabloid trash and quite frankly, I am sick of it.

- And there you heard from Mark Robinson, he was traveling earlier this week.

Give him credit, he got punched and he came out fighting, swinging at the media primarily.

So what happens with this case over this week and into the weekend?

- Yeah, so the big question mark is, I guess what happens next here.

He's retained an out-of-state law firm led by an attorney who's actually worked for former President Donald Trump in some of the 2020 election disputes.

So that's sort of a high profile name working to, I guess, ferret out some information of some sort that could disprove that these posts really came from him.

We haven't seen, as we're having this discussion on Friday morning, any evidence yet that's come out of that.

But we also have sort of this pending deadline at the end of this week set by US Senator Thom Tillis to essentially kind of put up or shut up, come up with some information that proves that this was not you or step aside, or that the Republican party should somehow move on, focus on other races, and just essentially, I guess, give in on the governor's race at this point.

So we'll see.

I think the next few days are gonna be really pivotal for Mark Robinson's campaign and figuring out whether they've got some sort of information that moves the narrative a little bit more in their direction, because right now it's just been bad news after bad news for his campaign.

- Mitch, we'll have Thom Tillis's interview just a little bit later that he, I guess CNN caught up with him and asked him a few questions.

I will say what I've seen online, there are many Republicans that are now coalescing around Mark Robinson now that this story is over a week old and whether they don't believe it or they believe it, they're supporting their candidate.

Your take on this.

It was a big bomb drop, week one.

Now we're into week two, he's fighting back and now there are attorneys involved, what seems to be awfully close to election day to try to start a court case now.

- Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see if Mark Robinson can have any kind of recovery from this bombshell.

There are certainly some Republicans who are going to be behind him no matter what.

And if you question anything about Mark Robinson, you're gonna be on their naughty list.

And so the interesting thing for Republicans moving forward is, how do you address those folks who are not gonna hear anything bad about Mark Robinson, and how do you address the people who might vote for Republicans but aren't gonna vote for Robinson and don't want anyone to associate with it now, that's gonna be an interesting, and difficult needle for Republicans to thread.

I think one of the common responses we've seen is what you saw from Senator Tolleson now from some others who said, "Hey, okay.

We'll take you at your word Mark Robinson, that this isn't you, but you've gotta offer some proof.

You've gotta do something.

He can't just say "It wasn't me" and then sort of move along.

They wanted him to see some sort of forensic examination, hiring this law firm.

This is something he had to do to get support from at least some of the Republicans who were skeptical, but were still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

- Lucille, as a reporter and as a journalist, how do we cover this story when there is a fair amount of people out there that won't believe a word the media says because Mark Robinson was right.

He has been smeared and that was a smear, but if it's true, is it a smear, you can get to all this nuance, but it's Republican supporters now of Robinson, and it seems to be another group of Republicans who are now against Robinson, and now we have a civil war of at least rhetoric.

- Yeah, I think it's really interesting.

I mean, what we know about CNN's KFILE that broke the story is this sort of their specialty.

They're great at digging into stuff like this, and they've laid out a ton of evidence that sort of shows how they did it.

This isn't a question of like how they got it.

They explain all of that.

There have been follow-up stories from organizations like Politico that have said you know, this is where his IP address was pinging from near his home at the time.

So we've sort of seen mounting evidence in the CNN story when it broke, and since then that this sort of was him.

I'm not really sure how his law firm is going to sort of be able to refute that, but what I think is really interesting is sort of, we know that there are gonna be Republicans that support him no matter what.

They're not the people that Republicans, the Republican Party is really concerned about right now.

They're worried about the people in the middle, and how people in the middle you know, these sort of swing voters, suburban white women, these are the people that they've been trying to get to coalesce around the Republican Party, President Trump and Mark Robinson, you know in recent months.

They're not really worried about sort of the people that are gonna support him no matter what.

They're looking for sort of the voters in the middle and if it's possible to move them at this moment.

And I think from what I'm hearing Republican Party folks, is that it's sort of looking less and less likely that they can get sort of those folks in the middle to sort of side with Mark Robinson after this.

- Don, what's the role of regional, state local media, if you will compare you know, when a story like this breaks at the national state, so we're reading in Politico about the supposed logs from the internet that were ping back to Mark Robinson's general location.

How do you squeeze all that in around CNN, Politico, New York Times, and all these other larger players, at least from a budget standpoint?

- Well, I mean you list everything as CNN reports.

We put it in the headline, you know, you add the other context, the Politicos reporting.

You know, WRL had a story out pretty soon after this about how Robinson was offered help to prove, disprove the IT.

I've been hearing a lot of that There were like multiple offers of that, that Robinson didn't want that help.

So it's cumulative with what everybody has, but it all goes back to CNN.

You always link back to their story, and explain that they laid out all these different connections, and then mention that Robinson denies it, and then tell everything else that's going on.

And we obviously in North Carolina, we can offer the context that that National doesn't have because they don't live here.

- Yeah, I mean there's been a lot of focus on sort of what does this mean for the rest of the Republican ticket, the North Carolinas, that's hurt Trump.

Does this hurt down ballot races?

Does this hurt Republicans' chances of keeping their super majorities in the legislature?

So a lot of it's been focused on the fallout because with local news outlets, we can't necessarily go in and do this level of digging and have this level of attorneys that CNN has to sort of defend themselves when they're potentially getting sued over the veracity of this.

I mean, we've already done most of the stories about what Robinson has said in a public forum that were definitely Robinson, whether that was on his personal Facebook page over the years, whether it was in speeches he's given to churches and different audiences.

There's a lot of very controversial things that he's said similar to this, but maybe not as extreme as what he's, y'know, accused of saying on this pornography site that sort of creates this image of who Robinson is and I think a lot of why he's behind 10% in the polls, even going into the story.

- And we've broken other news too.

Like, I mean, I, you know, had broken that the federal government was looking into the nonprofit, Balanced Nutrition, that Robinson's wife that closed earlier this year because of scrutiny.

And this is part of a much bigger picture, and I think part of the reason that the Robinson CNN story is such a big story is because of everything else that everyone has reported on, that they've laid out with.

And Robinson already was kind of this, not to this level, but was already a subject of- - We've all been on a Robinson beef for a long time in political circles in this state, at least among local journalists.

- And it's not just fodder for talking heads like the folks sitting here today.

This is something that is part of the campaign because Democrats have definitely leaped on this as a way to tie any other potential Republican candidate if they can to Mark Robinson.

We've seen Governor Cooper talking about Trump and Mark Robinson.

We've seen a number of ads in which this candidate or that candidate who's a Republican who once took a picture with Mark Robinson is now part of the Mark Robinson controversy.

And so this is something that needs to be followed 'cause it's gonna have an impact on November 5th.

- Well, I'm glad you mentioned that, Mitch, 'cause CNN caught up with US Senator Thom Tillis, who represents North Carolina.

Senator Tillis answered a few questions for the media.

Like you said earlier, he said Mark Robinson should sue CNN, put up or shut up, or drop his gubernatorial bid.

Here's what he had to say this week.

- I believe that Mr. Robinson needs to make a call fairly quickly, defend his name, or in the absence of a defense, then we've gotta move on.

And I would not, y'know... We'll be making that decision this week.

But I do think it's fair to give him the benefit of the doubt for a reasonable period of time, and I've fixed that as Friday.

- What does that mean, you're gonna make a decision this week?

- If Mr. Robinson doesn't put forth facts as part of a lawsuit that would discredit the sources by this week, then we've gotta move on.

We've got an election that's 40 days away and we've gotta move on and focus on President Trump's success in North Carolina, legislative races, the council, the state, all the other things that I'm focused on in North Carolina.

This is a lot bigger than any one person.

- But he can't drop out at this point?

- Well, he can't drop out, but you can stop.

Y'know, what the press is doing is trying to blame everybody.

Now, they're trying to use the new information that we know about him over the last two weeks as if people knew all of that when they endorsed him.

What they endorsed a year ago or six months ago was somebody where none of this was in evidence.

If it is in evidence today, then I think it's fair for them to say, "I did not know, I rescind my endorsement," like Kemp and Lee have done.

But the Democrats are now saying, well, it's really unseemly what they're doing, because they're basically saying that you knew or should have known something that none of us knew until KFile broke the story.

- But the cycle's gonna be, I've already seen it, the Democrats are trying to pretend, dishonestly, that all these folks said, does anybody in their right mind believe that if all of these things are true, that somebody would've endorsed him if they were true?

No.

But what are they doing politically?

They're pretending like that's the case.

- Some North Carolina Republican leaders have their eye down ballot where there are high profile races, including a very tight race between Democrat Jeff Jackson and Republican Dan Bishop for State Attorney General.

I wanted to bring a panel together to discuss the Attorney general race here at North Carolina, Public relations consultant Pat Ryan joins us, Dawn Vaughn with the News and Observer, former State Attorney General Rufus Edmisten and Mitch Kokai of the John Locke Foundation.

The Attorney General's race, I don't remember recently, has it been this high profile Rufus, what's it like to run as to become an attorney general?

- Well, you've gotta know a little bit.

You gotta be an, also the law says you have to be an attorney, for a change.

And it's one that's become nationally significant.

That's the thing I've noticed in recent years.

Now you have two people running here.

One is more traditional like consumer protection, letting the lawyers have their say and apparently the other candidate is thinking more nationally.

Now, how does that come into play?

It comes into play because the Attorney General has the authority under the law to enter any lawsuit, any thing that he thinks will hurt or help North Carolina.

And so that's what makes it a national office.

And so I think we're going to see a very different race about the Office of Attorney General.

And I'm more on the traditional side of take care of consumers and do the legal business.

- Mitch, what do you make of this race?

Is the profile elevated or is this just one of another council of state races possibly drowned out by a pretty hot gubernatorial and presidential ticket?

- I think this is a higher profile race than we have seen for Attorney General, but I do think it is going to be crowded out in some respects by what's happening with the presidential race and the gubernatorial race.

If those were easier to predict, I think you would see a heck of a lot more attention on this for a couple of reasons.

One, you have two sort of high profile North Carolina candidates.

We aren't talking about the local DA somewhere who's known by a few people.

You basically have two congressmen.

One is the TikTok Congressman Jeff Jackson.

The other one is a very well-known conservative firebrand, Congressman Dan Bishop, both running for a job that as Rufus said, has become a much more national job.

You're seeing attorneys general from states across the country who will sue an administration, presidential administration 'cause they don't like what they're doing, or they will sue some other part of the federal government 'cause they don't like what they're doing.

And whether your Attorney General ends up being part of that lawsuit or not tends to be tied into whether it's a democratic administration or a republican administration.

So I think you have that factor in there.

It's also important because from the Republican side, there's hardly ever been any republican ever in this job.

The last republican who had this job was a guy who got beat in a campaign by this gentleman that was our last republican Attorney General was back in the seventies.

And before that you have to go to the 1890s.

So this has been a job held almost exclusively by Democrats.

I think Republicans have looked at this for a while saying, hey, this would be a very important job to pick up.

Not only because your attorney general could be on the Republican side of these lawsuits that are taking place on a national level, but this also could be significant in terms of dealing with public corruption cases.

We haven't seen a whole lot.

Of state attorney generals dealing with, attorney generals dealing with public corruption in North Carolina, but could, depending on whether either Jeff Jackson or Dan Bishop wants to make that a priority.

So I think all of those things are factors that make this a race that should be high profile and maybe depending on how much people are paying attention to the other races.

- Pat, you cut your teeth in Republican administrations, working with Phil Berger.

So set aside that, but put on your PR hat.

Tell us about Dan Bishop, what vibe does he give off, what is he going for versus Jeff Jackson as a person, as a candidate?

- Yeah, sure.

So I worked with Congressman Bishop when he was in the state senate.

I've known him for a number of years.

You know, I know him to be a sort of thoughtful, if hard charging at times, really smart sort of legal mind.

His reputation that he has built in Washington DC has been largely affiliated with the Freedom Caucus.

He's been something of a thorn on occasion in the side of Republican leadership.

He, you know, largely says what he thinks, and sometimes he says it in ways that are hard charging.

That's part of his reputation.

It's part of what earns him allies, and it's part of what earns him I'm sure some enemies on the other side as well.

Congressman Jackson, I of course don't know personally, you know, his reputation even among Democrats has been somebody who's very focused on burnishing his own image.

He does, I think does a really good job with his social media videos.

I mean, there's a reason he has a million followers on TikTok or whatever it is.

The flip side of that is, again, people in his own party have said that he pursues, you know, an almost shameless level of self-promotion at the expense of substantive policy exposure or chops or victories or what have you.

You know, I think one of the funnier things that sort of floats around the Raleigh political circles was, it's been, I think, pretty widely reported.

Maybe Steve Harrison wrote about it a couple of years ago that Congressman Jackson's former colleagues in legislature on occasion referred to him as quote, baby Jesus.

And I think the rationale they gave was because there was a lot of crying and lying about, but not much else, or something to that effect.

Probably a little bit unfair to Congressman Jackson, but that is sort of the, that's like the, you know, what people talk about behind the scenes a little bit.

- But Pat and Jackson and I were, been in the senate chambers together for, you know, when you were working for Berger and Jackson was a state senator.

And of course I sit in the press corner behind all of them.

And Jackson, like you were saying with it's, you know, I don't know if TikTok was in use much even a couple years ago.

- [Group Member] Yes, fine, whatever.

- But Jackson would give the speeches, you know, speak a little louder, have like the video, and use that maybe in his, you know, campaign emails the next day.

He's good at getting attention and talking to people in a way that resonates with them.

- Especially younger voters.

Yeah, comes off as genuine and authentic and speaks plainly.

And he's very good at that.

- And Bishop is, you know, an interesting Tweeter and gets a lot of attention for that.

And he really, his affiliation with the Freedom Caucus has put him much more in the public eye.

So both of them are pretty big personalities.

- In our interview with Jeff Jackson earlier on this program, he says, I still want to use, we'll see if I win, how I handle TikTok and social media.

But there's a power in it.

And sometimes you got these old dogs in the Senate, looking at a young guy doing things a hip new way.

They don't understand it, so what do they do?

They put it down and make fun of it.

Is that happening here?

In your opinion, well, should I ask you your opinion or should I just move the opinion over to Rufus?

- I can give you my analysis.

- Yeah, give your analysis.

I'm not gonna use the word opinion, analysis.

- Jackson is middle aged, right?

I mean, and a lot of people, it depends on like what your personal life and professional life is, how much you use social media or not.

I don't know if it's age necessarily, but some people don't use it at all.

So he's trying to reach his voters where he can, where other people, you know.

Go out in the field, one-on-one or whatever platform they use to reach their voters.

So obviously it's working for 'em with Democratic voters.

- I would never be elected again, 'cause I used to shake hands and go out and meet people and say, hello, my name is Rufus Edmondson, I'd like for you to vote for me.

But that's passe now, - Representative Jackson told me we weren't in the interview, was sitting here.

He says, you know, I'm on TikTok.

I have a million followers or something like, that's a fact.

He says, voter identification still 35, 36% for the candidates in this Bishop Jackson race.

So no matter how famous he is on TikTok and maybe Instagram, two thirds of our voters still don't know.

Is that a societal problem or a money problem?

- Here's something I've noticed over all the years I've been in public office.

Young people will talk a big game, but they don't get with it when it comes to voting.

The Swifties, no matter what she does, they're not going to do anything more than they would do otherwise because the young people just don't take part as they should in proportion to their population.

- Another thing that we haven't brought up yet, but another reason why this race is so important is Josh Stein is vying to become the third straight attorney general to go from this office to governor.

So this has been a job that has been a stepping stone to being the highest level executive office in North Carolina.

I'm not sure if Dan Bishop would wanna do that, and he's getting probably closer to near the end of his career than the beginning.

But you would certainly see Jeff Jackson, if he wins this race, being a front runner the next time it comes around to being the next governor of North Carolina.

- It's clear he's quite ambitious.

- Right.

- No question about that either.

He was gonna run for US Senate before he ran for Congress.

Of course, he's running for Attorney General now, and yeah, I don't think anybody would be surprised if he pursued higher office beyond that, if he were to win.

- How many terms does it take Rufuss to get entrenched as an Attorney general where people will say, you're the shoe-in as a nominee for Governor.

- At least two.

- Eight years.

- I served 10 years and Mitch said that I beat the candidate for Attorney General that was Republican.

That was odd.

Jim Holsizer was governor.

Robert Morgan resigned from Attorney General to run for the US Senate and Jim Holsizer of my hometown, appointed a guy named Jim something out of Charlotte who was only Attorney General Mitch.

- Three months.

- For three months.

- Yeah.

- So that was no great.

- Why does the no great victory - Why does the state seem to prefer Democratic Attorney Generals?

The trend is certainly Democratic party for this particular race.

- I think, in my opinion, part of it has to do with Roy Cooper was Attorney General for a number of terms.

Popular, continued to win reelection.

- And one year had no Republican opposition.

- Right.

- 16 years in office.

- Yeah.

And Josh Stein was the incumbent in 2020.

He'd only won by 14,000 votes.

That was a very close race.

And you compare that, I think that maybe one of the better comparisons just in terms of what issues people think about when they're voting for that race is probably the judicial races.

And you've seen Republicans sweep those for the last, I think two election cycles.

Maybe that plays into what is now an open seat with a high profile Republican candidate.

Maybe he can finally break through.

- Dawn, how much coverage do you see this AGs race getting as we move towards election day with so much out there to cover?

- Yeah, I think it would've gotten a lot more attention.

Again, like we were saying, if the presidential race hadn't switched up so much, if it was still Biden and Trump and it's just a rematch and all of this stuff, but Harris has changed stuff.

This has only been what a month for that and because Stein and Robinson and how that campaign is, it's taking a lot of the attention.

But we still have a couple months to go and I feel like Jackson and Bishop, other than when they announced and started running, have kind of been quiet on their own stages.

- Yeah.

- Rufus, when it comes to an Attorney General, are voters gonna want one that looks inward?

Are they gonna look for an Attorney General, expect them to act more like the Attorney General out of New York or maybe California that goes for the national headlines of the big splash?

- I think they should and will probably want an Attorney General that look after business, that's looking out after consumers, keeping the swindlers out of the state, having a good law enforcement stance, and looking out for the underdog.

- Pat, with this last second, would Dan Bishop get into all that with the Texas border?

Would we see him play it nationally or would he, from what you know about him, would he dial it back and focus on the state?

Your opinion?

- I think if there's like a legitimate and reasonable avenue for a North Carolina Attorney General to involve himself in something like that, I don't think he'd have any qualms about it.

- All right, thank you panel for joining us.

We thank you for watching, and more voter information's at pbsnc.org/vote.

I'm Kelly McCullen.

Thanks for watching.

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