Josh Stein: "What Explains The Crazy Democrat-On-Democrat Sabotage In North Carolina?" Frank Bruni, New York Times

 

FOR SUBSCRIBERS	SEPTEMBER 22, 2022

Ben Wiseman

If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.

By Frank Bruni Contributing Opinion Writer

Josh Stein, the attorney general of North Carolina, has plenty of detractors, but if you ask knowledgeable Democrats in the state to name their party’s most likely nominee for governor in 2024, they’ll probably say Stein. Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat in his second term, can’t run for a third consecutive term, and no one in his party is better positioned to succeed him than Stein.

If you ask those same Democrats to name the greatest threats to North Carolina’s economic and political health, Mark Robinson will almost certainly come up. A far-right Republican popular with the MAGA crowd, he’s the state’s lieutenant governor and he’s presumed to be angling, like Stein, for the governor’s mansion. If he won his party’s nomination and faced a wounded and diminished Democrat, he just might get there.

Why, then, is a prominent Democratic prosecutor who does not seem to have her own immediate ambitions to become governor so intent on wounding and diminishing Stein? It’s the great mystery of current North Carolina politics, an act of Democrat-on-Democrat sabotage that’s as alarming as it is inscrutable.

The office of Lorrin Freeman, the Wake County district attorney, is going after Stein on the basis of an obscure state libel statute from 1931. The crime he allegedly committed: disparaging a candidate for public office in a manner that’s false or shows reckless disregard for the truth. His supposed victim is Jim O’Neill, who was his Republican challenger when he ran successfully for re-election as attorney general in 2020.

I care about truth, and I ardently wish that campaigns were conducted on a more honorable level than many of them are. But prosecuting a politician for smears is like prosecuting a bagel vendor for schmears. Certain trades have certain trademarks.

And was Stein’s smear even out of bounds?

Several years ago, when he was in his first term as attorney general, it became clear that North Carolina had an unusually large backlog of untested rape kits, about which there was considerable public consternation. O’Neill, then the Forsyth County district attorney, sought to use that to his advantage. He falsely accused Stein of ignoring the backlog.

Stein fired back with a television ad that said that O’Neill, as district attorney, “left 1,500 rape kits sitting on a shelf, leaving rapists on the streets.” The O’Neill campaign then filed a formal complaint with the North Carolina State Board of Elections, calling the ad “a direct lie” in violation of the 1931 statute because it implied that O’Neill controlled those kits when law enforcement agencies, not prosecutors, do. Stein stood by the ad, asserting that O’Neill could have assisted or put pressure on those agencies.

The state board recommended that the whole matter be dropped. And rightly so: Leaving something on a shelf is a figurative term, with a range of defensible interpretations. O’Neill had arguably besmirched Stein at least as recklessly as Stein had besmirched him. If such campaign salvos became criminal cases, we’d have to build new courthouses to accommodate the prosecutions. And there would be a meaningful threat to free speech and robust political discourse.

So why did Freeman’s office nonetheless bring Stein’s case to a grand jury, seeking an indictment that remains a possibility? An impressively reported article by Jeffrey Billman in The Assembly, a North Carolina publication, didn’t come to a definitive conclusion, and the Democratic officials with whom I’ve spoken in recent weeks are baffled. They’re also deeply concerned. No matter what happens to the case going forward, the actions of Freeman’s office to this point mean that a Republican running against Stein for governor would probably produce ads branding Stein a liar of criminal magnitude.

Freeman has said that she recused herself from decisions about an indictment of Stein to eliminate any impression that it was driven by a personal connection to him or O’Neill. Another prosecutor in her office, David Saacks, is officially in charge of the case. But Freeman has publicly defended it, and she answered several questions from me in an email exchange this week.

“Having reviewed the State Board of Elections investigation, Mr. Saacks determined that due diligence required a more thorough investigation,” she wrote. She added: “As prosecutors, our responsibility is to evaluate the evidence and follow the law. While this matter is pending, we cannot comment on the facts of the case or on the weight of the evidence.”

At issue, she wrote, is “whether a candidate or his or her campaign has a constitutional right to lie to the public.”

For now, the Fourth District Court of Appeals has issued a temporary injunction against any indictment of Stein until it can hear arguments about the constitutionality of the 1931 statute itself. Those arguments are months away.

When I spoke with Stein on Wednesday, he called the prosecution “an unfortunate abuse of power and resources.”

It’s all the more curious in light of what a gift it is to Republicans and to Robinson — and in light of the stakes. Many Republican officials are demonstrating a dangerous contempt for democratic processes and institutions, which their ascendance could jeopardize.

Robinson’s own contempt extends to homosexuality, which he has called “an abominable sin.” To transgenderism, which he has labeled “demonic behavior.” To Michelle Obama (“anti-American”). To the movie “Black Panther” (“made in the dominion of the devil” by an “agnostic Jew”). An article that Billman wrote for Indy Week in 2020 presented a jaw-dropping compendium of these gems.

Robinson’s kinder words are reserved for firearms. Days after the massacre of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, he traveled to Houston to deliver an impassioned pro-gun speech at a convention of the National Rifle Association.

The old Republican establishment in North Carolina regards him almost as warily as Democrats do. But that establishment’s say and sway have diminished significantly during this Trumpian time. Robinson could very well wind up carrying his party’s banner two years from now. But you wouldn’t know that from the persecution — er, prosecution — of Josh Stein.