FILE - North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson speaks before Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally March 2, 2024, in Greensboro, N.C. In his bid to become North Carolina’s first Black governor, Robinson assails government safety-net spending as a “plantation of welfare and victimhood” that he says has mired generations of Black people in “dependency” and poverty.
The Associated Press is the most trusted source of information on election night, with a history of accuracy dating to 1848.Yet now in the closing months of a swing state campaign, the nonprofit that provided the family a vital lifeline has also become a political liability. In March, state regulators launched a probe of the organization’s finances after flagging years of financial irregularities, including over $100,000 in unaccounted spending.
“I grew up poor,” Robinson says frequently, detailing his childhood as the son of an alcoholic father who died when he was in elementary school. He recounts that he “lost my car, my home,” was “forced into bankruptcy,” and “lost my job not once but twice.” They have left behind a trail of aggrieved creditors, including the Girl Scouts, court documents show. Among them was a former landlord whose wife was dying of cancer when the Robinsons shorted him $2,000 in rent, according to local news accounts and documents from a 2012 case.
Documented clearly, though, is a series of raises Hill gave herself with the blessing of a Balanced Nutrition board that included her family members. Robinson himself appears to have been paid through the nonprofit in 2018, as previously reported by The Daily Haymaker, a conservative North Carolina website. State records show he was slated to earn $42,000, though the organization did not report paying him on their tax filing that year, and he did not report making income from the organization on financial disclosure forms he filed as a candidate for lieutenant governor.
The campaign pointed to a separate, routine audit for the 2021 calendar year in which an independent firm “did not identify any deficiencies in internal control that we consider to be material weaknesses.”The independent firm, however, noted that its audit was not the same as additional reviews by the state agencies that issue grants and then closely assess how that money is spent.