Speaker 1: What's going on?
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And again, thank you so much for your support. We
usually talk to her at two o'clock on Mondays, but
we're going to talk to her right now.
Speaker 1: It's AP Dylon.
Speaker 2: She's a reporter for the North State Journal, a SJ
online dot com. Also you can read her work at substack.
Her newsletters called more to the story.
Speaker 1: Ap.
Speaker 3: How are you great, Pete? How you doing?
Speaker 2: I'm doing all right after I worked on my first
sunburn of the season. You know, That's what I did
sitting out at a soccer game on Saturday. So yeah,
I got that going for me. But I feel like
I'm in a bed 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?
Speaker 1: Was it two of his former staffers.
Speaker 3: 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 stories about a rumor that floated around following the
CNN story about the governor Lieutenant governor's use of a
pornographic website and a user id email Mini Soldier, and
they there was a rumor that was floating around that
kind of landed on the staffers as being an internal
leak to the CNN.
Speaker 2: That they were the source that gave CNN the lead
on the Nude Africa website and black Planet and Mini
Soldier account.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what it seemed to be. But after talking
to the campaign staffers and the folks who actually access
the email after the story came out, it turns 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, this Mini
Soldier one was completely new to them. So I talked
to Riley about it, and he provided me screenshots of
when they had stated in 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.
Speaker 2: This is them going in to try to log on
as Mini Soldier now apparent. And 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 they're doing your
comms for you. So this is not unusual for the
for the comm staffers to have access to his email
accounts and his passwords, and so when they what they
try to create or they try to log into the
Mini Soldier account and the passwords that they're using, none
of them work.
Speaker 3: Nope, none of them work. 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.
Speaker 2: So this is 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 those those data points would
have had to have been entered in by whoever had
control over that the other email account, which is I
am the majority USA at Gmail right.
Speaker 3: 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.
So it led crenibility to the fact that this rumor
didn't come out of the campaign itself. It came from
somewhere else.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Well, I first heard about it in December, and I
heard about it again in January, and it was floating
around and a couple of people had mentioned it to me,
but it didn't land in my inbox physically in my
inbox where you know, 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. He
said he wasn't gonna run for office and he would
only do things from the sidelines, but he's endorsed a
GOP chair I think in Irodale he's made. He went
and did some remarks in Durham of which I'm still
trying to get my hands on. 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,
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,
but call didn't come from inside the house, right.
Speaker 1: And these are this guy Riley.
Speaker 2: He was one of the staffers that immediately quit when
the story broke, and a lot there was like three
of them that quit right like the day of or
day after, or the weekend after something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was days after, and it was more than
just a couple. I mean, I think it was four
or five. The top folks took off, the campaign advisor
and a couple other staffers, communications staffers and 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.
Speaker 2: He has a quote here that you've got from Riley
in your piece, and this is over at North State
Journal's website. You can read it that it said to us,
it meant, if for good 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
Hacket or whatever.
Speaker 1: It was him.
Speaker 2: So these guys, Riley believes that the Mini Soldier account
was Robinson's.
Speaker 3: 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 re established
access to it after that point.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: This would have been what late, This was on Friday.
Speaker 2: In the the Rigs Griffin recount case that will not
ever end.
Speaker 1: So well, yeah, what was the latest there?
Speaker 3: Well, basically, the Court of Appeal cided into to one
decision with Griffin that his election protests were valid and
that the NTSB shouldn't the elections Boord shouldn't have dismissed
some of his elections protests, especially to the consider stuff
like voter registrations. 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
this Court of Appeals put out that we're going to
have fifteen days from the date disorders effective to get
the voters to cure their own registrations in order to
be counted. And there's sixty some one thousand of those,
and that complaint goes back a couple of years. There
was a lawsuit brought a couple of years ago that
brought this to the a tension of the Board of Elections,
and they didn't seem to do much with it. The
other one was the never residence 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 residence.
And there's about seven thousand of those, I believe. And
then there were some ones that didn't show voter ID
or didn't you know, register using voter ID, and you know,
their their identities weren't verified. And I think there's you know,
four or five thousand of those, and I think those
deal mainly with overseas and military ballots, so those those
might be a little bit more tricky because you know,
when you go to the polls, you have to show
your ID now, so that that could be argued that, yeah,
they've shown ID so, but the overseas voters, who knows.
But you know, at the heart of the case, though,
the two of them that really matter, I think are
the corrected registration form. You know, the these registration were
being entered into the database and they didn't have the
required verification like a Social Security number or you know,
birth dates or that kind of thing that are you
need to have in order for the registration to be
valid under state law and those things. There's about sixty
thousand of those and those were not corrected. So I
think that's that's a huge chunk there, And if this
goes forward, you know, it could 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 Yanks, or at least of back
and forth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no doubt about that.
Speaker 2: In fact, she and the State Board of Elections filed
paperwork today seeking a stay in the election dispute.
Speaker 1: So that's where we stay. Ye stand on that, Ap Dylan.
Speaker 2: You can read her work at the North State Journal
n SJ online dot com, and her substack is called
more to the Story. Thanks ap, We appreciate it. Have
a great week. We'll talk to you next Monday.
Speaker 3: Thanks, Pete.
Speaker 1: All right, take care, all.
Speaker 2: 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. It's an app
and it's a website and it combines news from around
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Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. All right, So from the North State Journal
article by ap Dylan, a rumor. The rumor was that
a staffer had leaked information to CNN in the month,
month and a half whatever it was, right before the
election about their boss, former Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. And
you know how he had this account on 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?
Speaker 1: I don't even get that, But and the stuff was
just awful.
Speaker 2: I read through and I never I could never any
of this stuff on the air because it was so
disgusting and in violation of I think seven or eight
thousand FCC rules. Okay, Like 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. On September nineteenth, twenty twenty four, is when
CNN published that article, and Robinson denied the report and
he said he was staying in the race. CNN's article
tied Robinson to comments made between two thousand and eight
through twenty twelve by tracing an email address, which was
Mini Soldier, across several different social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,
discussed Discuss.
Speaker 1: That's the it's like.
Speaker 2: The commenting app that like a lot of websites will
use instead of like the Facebook where 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 quoted in this, 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.
Speaker 1: Pat Riley not the guy from the New York Knicks.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: With him, and he said he had worked as she says.
Speaker 2: Riley had worked in the Lieutenant Governor's office and served
as director of campaign operations. Was among several staffers to
depart the campaign following the CNN articles publication. Others included
Robinson's top advisor, guy by the name of Conrad Pogorlaski
po Pogerzelski Okay, as well as the campaign manager, Chris Rodriguez.
So all three of them left. Conrad Poegerzelski, he said,
my team and I divided, devoted our lives to this campaign.
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
these this slanderous lie to come forward publicly rather than
hiding behind anonymous accusations. Now, Patrick Riley talked about and
we went over with AP a couple of minutes ago
there about how they tried to access the Mini Soldier
email account when the CNN article was published. This has
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.
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 forty eight hours, our first thought was,
there's no way this is real. There's absolutely no way.
Call Mark and Conrad talks to Mark, and Mark denied
it all to everybody one hundred percent. When the campaign
tried to access the email with one of the known
passwords used by Robinson, none of them worked.
Speaker 1: He said.
Speaker 2: 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. Riley went on
to say that the recovery email for the Mini Soldier account.
So when he tried to log into many Soldier at Yahoo,
he didn't have the right password, and so he said,
I need to reset and recover 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's cell phone. And that
is when they knew he had denied it to them.
Now they knew 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.
Speaker 1: That's his personal number, so they knew it. It was
his phone.
Speaker 2: It was his number you could send a text to
get into many Soldier at yahoo dot com. So to me,
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piece at the North State Journal by ap Dyllon quoting
Patrick Reilly, a former staffer for the Lieutenant Governor. The
former Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, Riley said, quote, Obviously, Robinson
still denies that he did it, that he was this
mini soul, he had this account and he posted all
of this disgusting.
Speaker 1: Filthy, vile stuff on these websites.
Speaker 2: 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,
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. 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?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: 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 many soldier,
right 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, 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, 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've been with him
the whole time, and we're supposed to believe that they
all now just were one of them crafted this entire
thing and.
Speaker 1: Then gave it to CNN. It doesn't make a lot
of sense.
Speaker 2: And of course it also doesn't make a lot of
sense after Robinson in like the last Council of State
zoom call. Council of State is the ten statewide elected offices,
you know, governor, lieutenant governor, Attorney general, Agriculture commissioner, Secretary
of State, like all of those ten spots, Council of
State and they meet like once a month. 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.
Speaker 1: That's the That would be my assumption. I don't know,
but yeah, that's what he did. So it looks it
looks like he did it. That's the way.
Speaker 2: And now it appears that he's trying to to make
some sort of inroads back into politics. Let's see here
to do ap Dillon reporting that he has endorsed Alex Nelson,
a candidate for GOP cheer in Iredell County. Robinson and
his wife Yolanda also attended an April seventh event in
Claremont in support of Nelson. Also, he allegedly spoke at
a GOP related event held 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 responses,
says it's all not true. It's a hatch a 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. Then there were people that were offering
services to him, like, hey, we can you know track
down this hack if that's what happened, we can you know,
go through the data and all of this, and he
was 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 twenty twenty four, filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN,
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
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message from Tommy. This is a it's a peatmeal and
Tommy says, so, Pete, would you be interested in buying
a slightly used mark Robinson for governor twenty twenty four.
Ball caps and if not, where in the hell can
I sell this thing?
Speaker 1: Well, you know what, it could become valuable at some
point in the future. You never know.
Speaker 2: 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 threeenty twenty four something.
Speaker 1: I gu you never know. You never know what else here? Oh,
get this.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: No, I don't.
Speaker 2: So this passed the North Carolina Senate. It's an effort
to require more transparency for patients. This is the story
at wr L dot com by Laura Leslie. The bill,
which passed by a vote of forty for to two,
so bipartisan, aims to give people a better idea of
what a medical procedure it might cost them before they
agree to it. Yeah, what, that's not the way we
do things here. Come on, this is the practice of medicine,
which I always remind people 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. I like,
that's surely you don't expect them to know what these
costs are. 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. 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 State House. 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,
but both of those bills went nowhere in the State
House 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?
Speaker 1: So weird.
Speaker 2: Supporters of the effort say that if Senate Bill three
point sixteen becomes law, it would at least give people
more information to make decisions on their healthcare, and ideally,
they say, it could potentially also lead to lower costs
for everybody in the future. Yes, because when you have
price transparence transparency, right, then not only does the patient know,
but the insurers know.
Speaker 1: The government knows, right, the state health plan would know.
Speaker 2: Remember Dale Folwell, the former state treasurer, 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. And 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,
and so he wanted he wanted to know, like give
me your 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 a like a thirty page document and all of
it was blacked out. So they don't want everybody to
know the prices. This is this is a fun test
too 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 tetnis shot. Do you want your tetanis 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 want to drain it for a tetnis shot?
And I asked my doctor what the price on it
was and he said, I don't know, 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 twenty years ago, and she comes back and says,
it's like over seventy dollars for a shot for this
tetnis shot, which seems weird. Doesn't that seem weird? It
seems like the tetnis SHOT's been around a while, you know. Anyway,
he said, I'll just wait till you step on a
rusty nail like that.
Speaker 1: You don't need it. Then at that price point you
don't really need it.
Speaker 2: You can get it if you want, if you you know,
you want to be safe, and you have seventy dollars 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 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, and everybody's
keeping you know, all of these numbers hidden from the
end point 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
concern that this bill's new restrictions on when hospitals can
charge facility fees, 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.
Speaker 1: This is a radical idea.
Speaker 2: 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.