Roy Cooper's emails finally released after almost 2 years of requests | Hour 3

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetecleanershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. Now, we normally talk to ap Dylan from the North State Journal, but she's off today, so we're not talking to her. However, I am going to bring to you a story that she had about Roy Cooper's emails. After five hundred and sixty nine days of delays and finger pointing between state agencies, some of former Governor Roy Cooper's official state emails have finally been obtained by the North State Journal. So it took almost two years to get copies of Roy Cooper's official correspondence via email from his terms in office. The records sought by the North State Journal starting in November of twenty twenty four, cover his first year in office from twenty seventeen. Okay, so two terms twenty seventeen through the end of his second term. At the time of. The request, Cooper's office claimed that it did not have custody of the governor's emails and directed North State Journal to the State Archives. The state Archives said they don't have the records. Well. Finally, after North State Journal issued a final formal demand citing state records production law, the first set of records arrived back in June. That production came only after the Department of Natural and Cultural Resource or the DNCR, which houses the archives, finally admitted there had been some confusion and the emails had remained in the governor's office custody the entire time. Oh so, they were in Many Cooper's possession, They were in Josh Stein's possession. They were in the Governor's office. They still had them, I see. But the archives were supposed to have them, but they did not. There's some confusion. After Cooper's office failed to produce the records before leaving office and then directed the North State Journal over to the archives. That agency insisted for more than sixteen months that the emails were still transitioning from the Governor's office and the Department of Information Technology and we do know that Roy Cooper has always been supportive of the transitioning. And asked. Jay sent multiple follow ups to both. The Archives and the DNCR, and every response followed the same pattern, which is, we do not have these emails or these records are not yet in the custody of State Archives. DNCR reports directly to the Governor. The secretary of the DNCR, named Reid Wilson, was appointed by Governor Josh Stein, but he was deputy secretary under Roy Cooper. Okay, so Reid Wilson was there under Cooper. He then was promoted under Stein. Now, vague assurances were given that staff was working with the Governor's office and it to transfer the records and it was always taking a little longer than anticipated, but they never gave any kind of firm delivery timeline, and no one clearly identified the exact current custodian, despite the fact that North State Journal kept asking that question, like who is the official custodian of all of the records. It was not until May twenty sixth that DNCR Communications Director Shore Johnson, longtime Democrat Operative guy Tom's Guy, responded to the Journal and their demand letter, and he acknowledged confusion over the records transfer and stated the emails had remained in the custody of the Governor's office. This entire time. We found them right next to the Whitewater files. They were right there the whole time. We had no idea that they were there. Oh my gosh, oopsie. So they produced those records finally, and they got North State Journal got three hundred and forty eight pages, which I mean, that's an improvement. When Roy Cooper was Attorney General for four terms sixteen years, I think they got like a dozen emails and they said, oh, Roy Cooper, he just prefers to chat on the phone. He doesn't like sending emails. So the three hundred and forty eight pages spanned February twenty seventeen through December twenty seventeen, so like not even a full year, eleven months that's what they got with the heaviest volume of Cooper's replies between August and October. Analysis of the production identified sixty five unique email conversations in which Cooper personally replied okay. His emails were brief responses sent from his iPhone, things like good or okay or good to go there were only two in instances of Cooper originating an email rather than just replying to staff okay. So like all of these emails were offered by staff, they would go to him and he would say okay, which like that sounds like me, or like a thumbs up. That's it. So, but they did find two emails that he actually wrote that he initiated. One was to Triangle Tire Company Limited, and this was about a JDIG grant Job Development Investment grant, So in other words, here's some tax money. We want to give you some tax money, some incentives so you can open up a business or expand a business or something. Right. So that was one email. And then the other email was an email to fox Con where he thanked fox Con for an invitation to visit their operations in Japan. This was part of another incentive program. So apparently Roy knows how to write the emails, but only to the businesses he's trying to bribe, i mean incentivize. The prolonged stonewalling on the records request fits a broader pattern during Cooper's time as Attorney General and as governor. The short iPhone centric reply style and rarity of original emails from Cooper align with a twenty sixteen WRAL investigation that found he left only a faint email trail during his sixteen years as AG. A similar records request from the North Carolina Republican Party produced fourteen emails from Cooper himself, So he's good for less than one email per year as Attorney General. North State Journal's email inquiries and calls and other records requests routinely went unanswered by Roy Cooper's office during his two terms as governor. This is how he operates. Do you think this is going to get any better if he wins the US Senate? Do you think that he's going to be producing records when people file Foyer requests? All this guy has done in his entire career is avoid emails. If he even is, I like, I would not be surprised to learn that he's running an email private email address and that's where he's doing a lot of his work. Or maybe he's just doing everything over the phone, so there's no record of any of his communications. Right for example, when he was whipping up the boycott against North Carolina over the HB two, right, the bathroom bill, all of that, no emails, just all phone conversations, I guess, and no record of any of his phone That's how this guy operates, always has all right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about create a video. Great local company in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now creative videos helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing group travel videos perfect for family reunions, church mission trips, group vacations, destination weddings, student trips, senior adult groups, sports teams, I mean, really, any gathering of people that you care about that's traveling together. 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You can email Katie Katie at group travel videos dot com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. All right, let me get to the text line here. Steve and fort Mill says, it seems to me that mister Cooper hired the same IT company that took care of Hillary's server system for his own. After all, he was her good friend Ray. That's true. That's true, my good friend Ray Cooper for governor. And she told the rally yeah maybe. So he was like, hey, Hillary, can you tell me can you recommend a good IT firm that can, like, you know, wipe away emails like with a cloth, could do something like that. She's like, no, we run our own Bob says, my good friend Ray's nickname should be ghost. Uh. Brenda asked, can North State Journal get Cooper's phone records or only government officials if he was using a gov co phone, Maybe yeah. I mean you're not going to get like the details of what was spoken about, but you would get I guess calls or something. But my bet is that if. You're going through these lengths to avoid any kind of a digital record that could be foided, I'm guessing he's probably using a personal cell phone. Speaking of my good friend Ray, caught him loose Cooper he did mark the one year anniversary of the murder of Arena Zarutska. Well, okay, somebody on his campaign staff did that. Was in control of his Twitter account because when Roy Cooper would tweet something on his own, usually about the Hurricanes, not the weather events, but the team. You know, because because. Roy Cooper is a big Hurricanes fan, so we all need to know that he's just like you and. Me, except he likes hockey. Anyway, he will sometimes when he sends out the tweets, he'll put RC at the end of the tweet to let you know that he wrote it. This tweet does not have that, So this I'm assuming came from a staffer. Okay, here's what he wrote over the weekend because on Saturday it was the one year anniversary of the murder of Arena Zerutzka on the Charlotte light rail line. Today marks one year since the horrific murder of Arena Zarutzka. Every family deserves to be safe in their community, and no one should have to endure this kind of loss. I'm keeping Arena's family and loved ones in my prayers. Unsigned I mean, it's that kind of personal message that really connects with voters, you know. It. Actually it did not. The tweet got what we call ratio. The ratio was like a two to one last time I saw it earlier today. Ratio means that you've got more replies than likes. So if you say something that people generally agree with, you get lots of likes, and that's sort of a normal thing. You have, you know, one hundred likes and maybe you have ten fifteen comments. Ratiod means you've got In this case, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of about eight hundred comments and like three hundred likes, So there are way more people that were prompted to respond, and I can tell you just looking through the comments there there were I did not see any that were supportive of what Cooper said. All of the comments were like, how dare you like you would have been better off not saying anything, although then people would have noted that he didn't say anything, and then they would have criticized him for that. Right, So I guess best to put out some you know, unsigned tweet like that, let people know that you are recognizing that the one year since her murder and you're giving up prayers to the family and nobody should have to endure this kind of loss, which I agree. But because I agree with that idea, I opposed Roy Cooper's crime agenda right because Roy Cooper as governor, like. He refused, like he vetoed the bill to or. A couple of them, if I recall correctly, that would have forced, for example, the local sheriff to cooperate with ICE to deport criminal illegal aliens. He put together the Racial Equity Racial Justice Equity Task Force or you know whatever. Like this was. This was part of the the BLM inspired agenda, and Roy Cooper was all in on it. He had to be. He was twenty twenty, he was running for reelection. So I marched out around the governor's mansion. I mean after he had fled for fear of his life. Right, they evacuated the governor's mansion when the fiery but mostly peaceful riots broke out on his doorstep. And so they evacuated the governor's mansion. But then the next day he came back and you know, did like a half block walk in solidarity, did the raised fist, pulled down the COVID mask that was, you know, protecting everybody from from COVID. But he took down the mask so everybody could see that he's he's marching with you. And then they like marched him into the governor's mansion and that was it. Oh and also remember he didn't deploy the National Guard to put down the violence. So whether it's the you know, the turnstile, catch and release judicial system that the Democrats want to implement in you know, all of the cities and have implemented here in North Carolina and Charlotte, I should say specifically Mecklelberg County. They've done it in Wake as well and in Durham, Right, like that who he is with. And so I don't think you get to stand up there and promote yourself as some sort of tough on crime guy when all of the things that you have aligned yourself with and the things that you have done are actually counterfactual to that. And if you go to the US Senate and there's any kind of national crime legislation, I know that you will be aligned with the National Democrat Party on those priorities and on that agenda, and that is a decarceration type agenda. You're not a tough on crime party. You're the party that wanted to defund the police. And I know you've scored a lot of your colleagues have scrubbed their social media to get that stuff off of there. But like I remember, it was only five years ago, So I remember, I remember you guys running around wanting to defund all the police and decarceraate, turn everybody loose. And in fact, Roy Cooper did just that, right He allowed for one thousand criminals to get early release out of the prisons, signed that collusive agreement with the NAACP. That's his record, all right. So the one year anniversary of the murder of Arena Zarutska on the Charlotte light rail line was on Saturday. I already mentioned Roy Cooper his campaign decided to tweet about it. He got ratioed dragged for it. Meanwhile, member of the family, the Zarutzka family, filed their lawsuit. We talked about this on Friday. The lawsuit was filed Friday afternoon, and here's from Julia con Over at the Charlotte Observer. Arena Zerutzka's family has filed a wrongfull death lawsuit blaming the City of Charlotte and its contracted light rail security company for the train step death of the twenty three year old Ukrainian refugee a year ago. Zarutska and her family were living in Charlotte after fleeing the Ukraine War when de Carlos Brown Junior allegedly fit. I don't know if we need the word allegedly here. The whole thing's on video. We've seen the video. I don't think there's any allegedly about it, you know, I understand why you would say that when reporting on a crime that has not yet been adjudicated. However, it's all on video. So I don't think you need the word allegedly there fatally stabbed her aboard the Charlotte Linx Blue Line. Her August twenty second death drew international attention and sparked questions about rider safety on Charlotte's public transit system. Her uncle, Frank Scott Haskell, filed the lawsuit in Meckelberg County Superior Court Friday afternoon, claiming it was a preventable death. The city and its security knew there were safety and crime issues related to its public transit and they quote were responsible for protecting lawful passengers from known and foreseeable dangers. Their failures caused the fatal stabbing. The lawsuit contends that simple fair enforcement turnstiles or proper security staffing, which the city had money for, could have saved Zarutzka's life. They claimed that if somebody were checking tickets to Carlos Brown Junior would not have been there in the first place. And I mean that's true, right. I mean, if somebody were on the platform ensuring everybody getting on the train as a ticket, or somebody's walking through the train checking to see if they have tickets, then he would not have been there. There would have been some interaction, and you wouldn't have been there, but nobody checked the tickets. Attorney Lauren Newton, a lawyer with ten Fulton, Walker and Owen law firm, argues the city knew its transit system was not safe and was responsible for trying to change that through security measures and fair enforcement. Four people died on or near the Blue line in the year before Zarutzka's death, four dead in the year prior on the line or near the Blue. Line, and so. There is a reasonable expectation that there is some sort of security issue on the train or along the line, and so you should be beefing up security. You have the money to do so, but you did not do so. She also in the lawsuit references the state auditors recently published reports which reveal the Charlotte Area transit system loses anywhere from five to six and a half million dollars to fair evasion every year and that it did not spend its full safety budget right And when we talked to the auditor about that heat that was one of the things that his report found. That they've got the money and they haven't spent it all. The city contracts with a firm called Professional Security Services or PSS for thirty nine armed security officers. This was in twenty twenty four, but had only eleven registered when Zerutzka died. Okay, so they only had like what a third to a quarter staffing, But even thirty nine officers would be nine short of what should have been required. The light rails forty eight cars. Professional security services officers were paid to protect quote at a minimum, the entire Blue Line light rail and Gold Line streetcar, as well as the Cat's bus transit centers, with particular emphasis on the Charlotte Transportation Center. Right, So you were understaffed, You did not have enough security personnel. You got this contract and you're not staffing it at an appropriate level to provide the security that you are contracted to provide. Zerutzka's uncle, represented by the lawyer Newton, wants a jury trial and is suing for at least one hundred and seventy five thousand dollars in damages related to wrongful death and negligence. And then the Observer also had another story one year after Zaruzka's death, is there a safety issue on the Blue Line? And so they talk to riders do you feel safe? Do you feel safe on the Blue Line? Local officials have adopted a number of changes, including a new fair Enforcement program to improve security and a new fair policy to streamline the ticketing process. While riding the light rail with Charlotte Observer reporters, David Longo, who is vice chair of the Metropolitan Public Transportation Authorities Safety Committee, rattled off a list of improvements that's been made or are in the works. He says, over the next six months, officials, we'll look at using new technology as a force multiplier to bolster security. Yuh oh. Does that mean we're going to be using data centers? Oh, my goodness, We're going to need more data centers people. A text from Jennifer who says, Saturday night, I spoke to an employee of the Charlotte Rail who stood there and assured me that the light rail was perfectly safe because only one person had ever been murdered on it. She also tried to tell me that the train was in fact not a floating homeless shelter, and that it was just impossible to put up gates or turnstiles to take tickets. This kind of denial and outright lying is why we're in the situation we are in. Well, so I'm not sure about that those stats there, because, according to the Federal Transit Administration data, the FTA, Charlotte reported seven major security events on its light rail system in twenty twenty five. Seven major security events, more than double the three reported the year prior. The increase in twenty five came even as ridership declined, so you had like double the number of major events, but ridership fell about two percent, or one hundred and twenty nine thousand passenger boardings. Of the seven major security events, three were classified as assault or homicide events not involving transit workers. One of those was the killing of Arena Zarutska. The other four were classified by the federal database as quote other major security events. Now. The database, according to wcnc's report by Walker Lawson, says the database does not identify exactly what those four incidents were. However, the federal category can include serious incidents like robbery, sexual assault, theft, arson, vandalism, or bomb threats. Over So, like, I don't know, just bitballing here, but maybe we should collect better data, maybe be a little bit more precise in the data collection, you know, just an idea. Overall, twenty twenty five mark Charlotte's highest number and highest rate of major light rail security events during the four year period going back to twenty twenty two. The calculations that WCNCTV ran for twenty twenty two through twenty twenty five, Charlotte has the fourth highest rate among the seven systems analyzed. The only ones that had higher rates San Jose, Saint Louis, and Baltimore. Now, they point out that this comparison does not measure every crime or safety issue occurring on the transit line. It specifically examines major security events that were reported to the FTA, and the federal database also contains partial figures for this year, and so far Charlotte has not reported a major light rail security event, at least that's been published to the database. Now back to the Charlotte Observer story where they spent several hours riding around on the light rail line to see about the security and talk to riders if they feel safe and. This fella yeah. David Longo from the Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority Safety Committee says it would be difficult to implement a closed system, in other words, putting up turnstiles and gates. That would be difficult, but I would point out here that State Orditor Dave Bollock said, just because it's difficult doesn't mean you shouldn't do it right. You can't just say, oh, that's too hard, so we shouldn't do it. Longo said, at the very least, it would likely require running fencing all around the line and installing a gate system that impacts trains. And then he. Says this, which well left me a bit puzzled, said, the big question that I have is are we creating more of a hazard for people than we are protecting? What would be the greater hazard. I'm not like, I'm not following this line of thinking that it's like, oh, we can't possibly install gates and turnstiles, you know, fencing and barriers whatever around the light rail stations because that creates a hazard. What hazard? What hazard are you talking about? And also I'm not sure you have to actually fence the entire train line because how how would you do the fencing across the the gate crossings with roads. I've never seen that. Now, granted I did grow up in New York. I am familiar with with trains. I've seen them, I grew up with them in the neighborhood and they would they would ride past and stuff. And I do admit some of the some of the lines did have some fencing, but I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that the fences never went across the roads, Like I have never encountered a fence that went across roadways at the at the gate crossings. The question is how do you harden the platforms? How do you make that more secure? So the only people that get onto the platform are people who have tickets, right, that's the question. And I feel like creating a structure or fencing, turnstiles, gates, whatever you're gonna call it, I feel like doing that at the platform doesn't actually create any hazards unless you're concerned like what people are just gonna be like walking into the wall or something, or into the fencing. You're just not gonna see it. I don't know. We're not electrifying these fences. So like, again, I don't see the hazards here, But what do I know? Just a little old radio host. 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, 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 dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.