Robinson related rumors and the longest election (04-07-2025--Hour1)

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[00:00:29] We usually talk to her at 2 o'clock on Mondays, but we're going to talk to her right now. It's AP Dillon. She's a reporter for the North State Journal and sjonline.com. Also, you can read her work at Substack. Her newsletter is called More to the Story. AP, how are you? Great, Pete. How are you doing? I'm doing all right after I worked on my first sunburn of the season. You know, that's what I did.

[00:00:51] I'm sitting out at a soccer game on Saturday. So yeah, I got that going for me. But I feel like I'm in a better place maybe than, I guess, Mark Robinson, the former lieutenant governor, ran for governor. And so this is a bit of a scoop that you've got over at North State Journal. You talked with, what, I guess, two? Was it two of his former staffers?

[00:01:17] Well, the main staffer that I talked to was Patrick Riley. He was in the governor's office and then moved over to the campaign doing campaign communications and operations there. Basically, the story is about a rumor that floated around following the CNN story about the lieutenant governor's use of a pornographic website and a user ID email mini-solder.

[00:01:43] And there was a rumor that was floating around that kind of landed on the staffers as being an internal leak to CNN. That they were the source that gave CNN the lead on the nude Africa website and Black Planet and the mini-solder account.

[00:02:01] Yeah, that's what it seemed to be. But after talking to the campaign staffers and the folks who actually accessed the email after the story came out, it turned out that, no, they were not the leakers. They didn't even know about it. They had only known about one handle that was used, a Gmail account, over the past six years that they were familiar with. And this mini-solder one was completely new to them.

[00:02:26] So I talked to Riley about it, and he provided me screenshots of when they attempted, dated and timestamped, when they attempted to access that account for the first time. And the account recovery options were needed because none of the passwords that they knew of worked. Right, so this is them going in to try to log on as mini-solder.

[00:02:49] Now, for people who aren't aware of this, when you are a political candidate, your staffers have, like, a lot of control and access into your email accounts and stuff because they're doing your comms for you. So this is not unusual for the comm staffers to have access to his email accounts and his passwords.

[00:03:10] And so when they, what they try to create or they try to log into the mini-solder account and the passwords that they're using, none of them work? Nope, none of them worked. So they had to go to account recovery. And the account recovery email was the one that they did have access to, but also a cell phone number. And that cell phone number was the personal phone of the lieutenant governor.

[00:03:34] So this is, and anybody who's ever, you know, forgot your password, click here, whatever, and then they send you, like, they reset your password and they send, but they send it to a different email account and or a text message. Right? So they verify it's you, but also you can reset the password and get access. And so that would have had to have been entered.

[00:03:55] Those data points would have had to have been entered in by whoever had control over that other email account, which is I am the majority USA at Gmail. Right? Yes, correct. And I had two former staffers confirm that Riley and several of the other campaign staffers who were there at the time verified that all three of them were there when they tried to first access the account.

[00:04:21] So it led credibility to the fact that this rumor didn't come out of the campaign itself. It came from somewhere else. Mm-hmm. So somebody's trying to blame the staffers, or at least, so I don't even know, is the rumor still, is that still floating around up in Raleigh, or has everybody just kind of, like, moved on from this story? I know that, like, the rumor probably popped right when the story did, but is it now kind of, like, dissipated?

[00:04:47] Well, I heard, I first heard about it in December, and I heard about it again in January, and it was floating around, and a couple people had mentioned it to me. But it didn't land in my inbox, physically in my inbox, where I had to consider doing something with it until just the last week or so here. And I think it was mainly prompted by the fact that Robinson has been out doing political things again. Mm-hmm.

[00:05:11] He said he wasn't going to run for office, and he would only do things from the sidelines, but he's endorsed a GOP chair, I think, in Iredell. He went and did some remarks in Durham, of which I am still trying to get my hands on. And so I think that this popped up again in my inbox because of those things. And the staffers, you know, are really kind of discouraged. Some of them have been having trouble finding jobs after this.

[00:05:41] And a lot of it had to do with this alleged rumor that was floating around that it was a staffer that leaked it. So I think that this is fairly debunked at this point. It wasn't an internal leak. The call didn't come from inside the house. Right. And this guy, Riley, he was one of the staffers that immediately quit when the story broke. And there was like three of them that quit, right, like the day of or day after or the weekend after, something like that.

[00:06:08] Yeah, it was days after, and it was more than just a couple. I mean, I think it was four or five. But the top folks took off, the campaign advisor and a couple other staffers, communication staffers, that sort of thing. But I also think that there were some departures from his actual office of the lieutenant governor. And I'm not privy to those that list of names right now. But he has a quote here that you've got from Riley in your piece.

[00:06:35] And this is over at North State Journal's website. You can read it. It said to us, it meant if forgot password leads you from the mini soldier account to the email that we know that you have, unless CNN or Josh Stein or somebody had his phone and got a text message to his personal phone number, they couldn't have got into that email to hack it or whatever. It was him.

[00:07:03] So these guys, Riley believes that the mini soldier account was Robinson's. Yes. Yeah. And in fact, I think that was proven true later once they did gain access. Like a month later or in December, it might have been, Robinson used that email account to log into a Zoom meeting. I think it was the Council of State. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously they regained access to it or they reestablished access to it after that point. Yeah.

[00:07:29] Well, I mean, when you got a great handle, you know, when you have that, when you go to all those lengths to create the catchy name for your avatar, like you don't want to just give it up. So I don't know. It's not even a good name anyway. All right. So let me ask you now, the North Carolina Court of Appeals, they issued a ruling. This would have been what, late? This was on Friday in the Riggs-Griffin recount case that will not ever end.

[00:07:59] So, yeah, what was the latest there? Well, basically the Court of Appeals cited in two-to-one decision with Griffin that his election protests were valid and that the NTSB shouldn't, the elections board shouldn't have dismissed some of his elections protests, especially the two that consider stuff like voter registrations.

[00:08:23] They had found that the State Board of Elections had been told of the error in some of these voter registrations that have been continued to allow to happen, and they hadn't cured them or done anything to fix them, which is part of the order that the Court of Appeals put out that they're going to have 15 days from the date this order is effective to get the voters to cure their own registrations in order to be counted. And there's 60-some-odd thousand of those. And that complaint goes back a couple years.

[00:08:52] There was a lawsuit brought a couple years ago that brought this to the attention of the Board of Elections, and they didn't seem to do much with it. The other one was the never-residents. And these are people who have never lived in North Carolina. Their parents may or may have not lived in North Carolina at some point, but yet they're registered to vote here, having never set foot in the state. That's why they're called never-residents. And there's about 7,000 of those, I believe.

[00:09:19] And then there were some ones that didn't show voter ID or didn't register using voter ID, and their identities weren't verified. And I think there's 4,000 or 5,000 of those, and I think those deal mainly with overseas and military ballots. So those might be a little bit more tricky because when you go to the polls, you have to show your ID now. So that could be argued that they've shown ID. But the overseas voters, who knows?

[00:09:49] But at the heart of the case, though, the two of them that really matter, I think, are the corrected registration form. These registrations were being entered into the database, and they didn't have the required verification, like a Social Security number or birth dates or that kind of thing that you need to have in order for the registration to be valid under state law. And those things, there's about 60,000 of those, and those were not corrected.

[00:10:17] So I think that's a huge chunk there. And if this goes forward, you know, it could turn the election back to Griffin. However, Riggs on Friday afternoon immediately came out and said that we're going to be appealing it to the North Carolina Supreme Court. So we're going to have another couple weeks or at least of back and forth. Yeah, no doubt about that. In fact, she and the State Board of Elections filed paperwork today seeking a stay in the election dispute. So that's where we stand on that.

[00:10:47] AP Dillon, you can read her work at the North State Journal, NSJOnline.com. And her sub stack is called More to the Story. Thanks, AP. We appreciate it. Have a great week. We'll talk to you next Monday. Thanks, Pete. All right. Take care. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News.

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[00:12:32] All right. A couple of these porn websites. Nude Africa and Black Planet. And was, yeah, like the confounding thing was, like, who posts stuff like that on a porn site? I don't even get that. But, and the stuff was just awful.

[00:12:58] I read through, and I never, I could never read any of this stuff on the air because it was so disgusting and in violation of, I think, 7,000 or 8,000 FCC rules. Okay? Like, you, I couldn't even, couldn't even reference this stuff. And remember, he immediately came out and said, it's all a lie. And he said, oh, I got hacked. It must have been a hack or something like that.

[00:13:25] On September 19th, 2024 is when CNN published that article. And Robinson denied the report. And he said he was staying in the race.

[00:13:36] CNN's article tied Robinson to comments made between 2008 through 2012 by tracing an email address, which was mini soldier, across several different social media platforms, like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Discus.

[00:14:00] Discus, that's the, like, the commenting app that, like, a lot of websites will use instead of, like, the Facebook. You can leave comments using your Facebook profile, but Discus is sort of, it hosts a lot of that stuff. Anyway, the CNN article never did cite any human sources. And that raised my suspicion. You don't have anybody, right, quoted in this.

[00:14:27] And you also don't tell us how you came across this information. And that led to the speculation up in Raleigh about who may have been involved. And so this was how the rumor started that it was somebody on Robinson's staff who had leaked the information to CNN. And the one that is named in these rumors is a guy named Patrick Riley. Pat Riley.

[00:14:55] Not the guy from the New York Knicks. He is currently now out of politics, apparently. Can't get a job in politics, so I think he's in the insurance industry. And AP, Dylan, got an interview with him. And he said he had worked, she says, Riley had worked in the lieutenant governor's office and served as director of campaign operations. He was among several staffers to depart the campaign following the CNN article's publication.

[00:15:24] Others included Robinson's top advisor, a guy by the name of Conrad Pogorzelski. Pogorzelski. Okay. As well as the campaign manager, Chris Rodriguez. Okay. So all three of them left. Conrad Pogorzelski. He said, my team and I devoted our lives to this campaign.

[00:15:50] Anybody who believes I or my staff would torpedo years of sacrifice in the final weeks by working with a liberal media outlet is completely delusional. I invite anybody spreading this slanderous lie to come forward publicly rather than hiding behind anonymous accusations.

[00:16:07] Now, Patrick Riley talked about, and we went over with AP a couple minutes ago there, about how they tried to access the mini soldier email account when the CNN article was published. This has not been reported on until now. Riley said that they had the access to one of, or several, but one personal Gmail address that was held by Robinson.

[00:16:37] I am the majority. That was the name of the email account. And regarding the mini soldier account, Riley said, I didn't even know that email existed at all. That's a Yahoo account. But when we got word that CNN was giving us 48 hours, our first thought was there's no way this is real. There's absolutely no way. So they call Mark and Conrad talks to Mark and Mark denied it all to everybody. A hundred percent.

[00:17:07] When the campaign tried to access the email with one of the known passwords used by Robinson, none of them worked. He said, I tried to log in myself because Mark's password was the same pretty much for everything. So heads up, Robinson. You probably want to change your password. Um, Riley went on to say that the recovery email for the mini soldier account. So when you, he tried to log into mini soldier at Yahoo, he didn't have the right password.

[00:17:37] And so he said, I need to reset and recover my, my email access, my password. And they said, okay, here's the email and phone number on file for your recovery. And it was, I am the majority. And it was Robinson cell phone. And that is when they knew. After he had denied it to them. Now they, now they knew.

[00:18:04] Because the email staffers knew that I am the majority one. And the cell phone number was the one that Robinson had been using for like six years. That's his personal number. So they, they knew it. It was his phone. It was his number. You could send a text to get into mini soldier at Yahoo.com. So to me, that meant, hey, he did it. Here's a great idea. Yep. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in Western North Carolina, just a quick drive up the mountain.

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[00:19:29] Call or text 828-367-7068. Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Okay, back to the piece at the North State Journal by A.P. Dillon. Quoting Patrick Riley, a former staffer for the lieutenant governor, the former lieutenant governor Mark Robinson. Riley said, quote,

[00:19:53] Obviously, Robinson still denies that he did it, that he was this mini-soldier. He had this account and he posted all of this disgusting, filthy, vile stuff on these websites. But to us, that meant when he tried to log in to get the password and it says, you know, if it prompts you to the other email and phone number,

[00:20:19] then that would indicate that, you know, somebody else had set up that account. And that somebody else was probably Mark Robinson because it was connected to him and his other accounts. Two sources familiar with the campaign confirmed on background to North State Journal that Riley's claims about accessing the mini-soldier email were accurate. Riley also told North State Journal that whoever was pushing the rumor now was a, quote, sorry human being.

[00:20:48] And Riley says he has heard Mark Robinson himself saying that Riley leaked the information. So Riley has heard rumors that Robinson is pinning this on him. And Riley is saying that's garbage. That's not true. So why would Robinson say that? Right.

[00:21:18] So let's assume for the moment, let's assume that this is all some big hit job. Right. Robinson didn't write any of that stuff. He didn't go by mini-soldier or whatever. Because he denied all of this. Let's assume that's the case. So you would think then that he would have to be highly suspicious of the people in his camp. Right. Because if they had access to all of his email accounts, they knew his password.

[00:21:48] They could have created this thing themselves, which does not make a lot of sense because the people that were around him had been around him from the very beginning. These were guys that, like, saw Mark Robinson do the speech at the Greensboro City Council. And that video went viral.

[00:22:10] And they then started working with him and parlayed that into a successful run for lieutenant governor. And then they were going to run for governor. Right. They were they've been with him the whole time. And we're supposed to believe that they all now just or one of them crafted this entire thing and. And then gave it to CNN. It just it doesn't make a lot of sense.

[00:22:37] And of course, it also doesn't make a lot of sense as after Robinson and like the last Council of State Zoom call. Council of State is the the 10 statewide elected offices, you know, governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, agriculture commissioner, secretary of state, like all of those 10 spots. Council of State and they meet like once a month.

[00:23:01] And Robinson joined the Zoom call and the name on the account is mini soldier. And I'm assuming that's the case because. When he joined, he joined using that Yahoo email. That's the that would be my assumption. I don't know, but. Yeah. That's what he did. So it looks.

[00:23:30] It looks like he did it. That's the way. And now it appears that he's trying to. To make some sort of inroads back into politics. Let's see here to do to do AP Dillon reporting that he has endorsed Alex Nelson, a candidate for GOP chair in Iredell County. Robinson and his wife, Yolanda, also attended an April 7th event in Claremont in support of Nelson.

[00:23:55] Also, he allegedly spoke at a GOP related event held in Durham in March. Now, you may recall that. Robinson, when the CNN story came out and people were like, you know, well, what's your response? He says it's all not true. It's a hatchet job. It's a smear. It's a lie. And we're going to focus on the campaign. And that didn't that didn't suffice. And then people started saying, like, dude, you need to file for defamation.

[00:24:23] And there were people that were offering services to him like, hey, we can track down this hack. If that's what happened, we can go through the data and all of this. And he said no to all of that. And that raised suspicions. And then, of course, he announces he's going to file a lawsuit. And that was done in mid-October 2024, filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN.

[00:24:50] And then and then after he lost and then he's out of office in January, they dropped the lawsuit. They announced the lawsuit was being dropped. So, again, like all indications are that the CNN story was, in fact, correct, that he did use that handle, which then, of course, now raises the prospect that some of the other stories about him going into the porn shop and all of that. Maybe some of that stuff was true, too. All right.

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[00:26:14] Located in Mint Hill, just off 485. Mail orders are accepted, too. Get all the details at createavideo.com. A message from Tommy. This is a Pete mail. And Tommy says, so Pete, would you be interested in buying a slightly used Mark Robinson for Governor 2024 ball cap? And if not, where in the hell can I sell this thing? Um, it's either.

[00:26:44] Well, you know what? It could become valuable at some point in the future. You never know. It's one of those things. You know, like you bought the cap and then, you know, it's a piece of history. Maybe somebody, I mean, Mark Robinson is a pretty unique name. You just hold on to that thing for like another century. Maybe another Robinson runs for governor in 3024 or something. Like, you never know.

[00:27:14] You never know. Um, what else here? Oh, get this. There is a bill in the North Carolina legislature now that would restrict the practice of surprise billing. Which, I don't know about you, but I always look forward to the surprise bills, right? Like, I love surprises, especially big fat medical bills from hospitals that show up. No, I don't. So this passed the North Carolina Senate.

[00:27:43] It's an effort to require more transparency for patients. This is the story at WRAL.com by Laura Leslie. Actually, the bill, which passed by a vote of 44 to 2, so bipartisan, aims to give people a better idea of what a medical procedure might cost them before they agree to it. What? That's not the way we do things here. Come on. This is the practice of medicine, which I always remind people.

[00:28:12] There's a reason they call it the practice of medicine and not the perfect. Okay? So, they don't even know what the price of these things might be. And so, I don't know how they're going to be able to come up with a price tag for your procedure before you get it. Like, that's, surely you don't expect them to know what these costs are.

[00:28:35] This would give patients more certainty over whether their care will be in network or out of network and to stop new bills from continuing to arrive months and even years after the procedure. The proposal would also include requirements to insurance companies' utilization review processes, including a three-day timeline for prior authorization.

[00:28:59] It does not go as far as some House Republicans have proposed in overhauling that whole system, the prior authorization process. Right? You've got to get prior authorization before you go in for the procedure. The bill now goes to the statehouse. Don't know if it's got a chance to succeed over there. The Senate has passed similar bills in recent years, two different times.

[00:29:24] But both of those bills went nowhere in the statehouse in the face of intense lobbying in opposition by the hospital industry. Why wouldn't they want people to know the price of their services? So weird. Supporters of the effort say that if Senate Bill 316 becomes law, it would at least give people more information to make decisions on their health care.

[00:29:50] And ideally, they say it could potentially also lead to lower costs for everybody in the future. Yes, because when you have price transparency, right, then not only does the patient know, but the insurers know, the government knows, right? The state health plan would know. Remember Dale Falwell, the former state treasurer?

[00:30:16] And he got sideways with the hospital industry because he wanted to do the clear pricing plan. He wanted to, you know, give people the information. But more importantly, he's the administrator of the state employee health plan. And he wanted to know how much does a hip replacement cost in Greensboro versus Charlotte. And you're getting these, you know, great disparities in the pricing depending on the hospital, the location, whatever.

[00:30:46] And so he wanted to know, like, give me your price list. And they refused. And then I think he had to, like, hit him with a Freedom of Information Act request. And then they finally divulged some of it to him. But it was all blacked out. They redacted, like, some ridiculous amount of pages. Like, it was like a 30-page document and all of it was blacked out. So they don't want everybody to know the prices. This is a fun test, too.

[00:31:12] When you go to the doctor and they ask you, because I did this one time when I first got my HSA account. And they said, oh, you're due for a tetanus shot. Do you want your tetanus shot? And I said, well, I'm paying for it with my HSA. So I would like to know what the price is. Because I had just started the HSA and I didn't have a lot of money in it. And so I didn't, you know, want to drain it for a tetanus shot. And I asked my doctor what the price on it was. And he said, I don't know.

[00:31:41] And he's like, well, so he sends the nurse out to go find the price on it. And when she comes back, now this was like 20 years ago. And she comes back and says it's like over $70 for a shot. For this tetanus shot. Which seems weird. Doesn't that seem weird? It seems like the tetanus shot's been around a while. You know? Anyway, he said, I'll just wait until you step on a rusty nail. Like that, you don't need it then. At that price point, you don't really need it.

[00:32:11] You can get it if you want. If you, you know, you want to be safe and you have $70, whatever. But that's up to you to decide. That's the free market. Right? That's the free market. Let people know what the price is. The whole system is so out of whack because we don't get the signals. From the provider and the user. We have insurance companies in the middle. We got government regulators in the middle of it.

[00:32:35] And everybody's keeping, you know, all of these numbers hidden from the endpoint user. The patient. And the patients may be making different choices based on the pricing. And the competition between the hospitals is also short-circuited because you don't see, they don't see each other's pricing. Some Democrats voiced concerns that this bill's new restrictions on when hospitals can charge facility fees,

[00:33:03] though, could be problematic for hospitals' operational budgets. And the bill would also require hospitals to send patients an itemized bill before the hospital could send the patient into collections for not paying their bill. So you would have to actually know what you're getting charged for. This is a radical idea. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast.

[00:33:33] So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening. And don't break anything while I'm gone. I'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you.