RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Several top staffers in North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor have quit their posts, marking more fallout from a CNN report outlining evidence that he made disturbing posts on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.
The campaign said in a news release Sunday that senior adviser Conrad Pogorzelski III, campaign manager Chris Rodriguez, the campaign’s finance director and the deputy campaign manager “have stepped down from their roles with the campaign.” Information on new campaign staffers would be forthcoming soon, the release said.
“I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavors,” Robinson said in the release.
Pogorzelski, who helped Robinson get elected lieutenant governor in 2020 in his first bid for public office and later became his chief of staff, said separately on Sunday that additional staffers also left the campaign — the deputy finance director, two political directors and the director of operations.
Pogorzelski, in a text, said that he “along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord.”
The CNN report on Thursday unearthed past posts it said Robinson left on a porn site’s message boards in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI;” said he enjoyed transgender pornography; said in 2012 he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama; and slammed the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “worse than a maggot.”
Robinson denied writing the posts and said Thursday that he wouldn’t be forced out of the race by “salacious tabloid lies.” He avoided directly discussing the controversy during a gubernatorial campaign event on Saturday evening at a race track in Fayetteville. The event happened after earlier in the day former President Donald Trump didn’t mention Robinson at a rally…
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