Mark Robinson needs to SHUT UP and PAY UP.
The gubernatorial campaign is long over. The drive-by media is no longer calling him to film his rants and ask about his web-browsing practices. Balanced Nutrition is closed up. Rachel Hunt is now lieutenant governor.
*Somebody* has got a lot of free time on his hands now. *What. To. Do?*
Some of the last news we got about the Mark Robinson family was that Balanced Nutrition – a 
nonprofit contractor with the state of North Carolina run by Robinson’s wife Yolanda, and which had employed at various times Robinson himself, his son, his daughter, and his now-late mother-in-law — had collected at least six figures worth of federal funds via NC DHHS it was not entitled to collect.
Robinson and his family have reportedly balked at repaying the taxpayer money. NC DHHS told us the matter has been handed over to the collections operation at the state Department of Justice. Apparently, it’s still sitting there. No one in Jeff Jackson‘s operation will talk about it. FOIA requests regarding Balanced Nutrition are being ignored. I guess we’re just supposed to take the political establishment’s word that the debt is being aggressively pursued.
One of the more appalling aspects of the Balanced Nutrition fallout? The $101,000+ debt was for only three months of Balanced Nutrition’s eight-year lifespan. Just imagine how big the debt would be if the probe had expanded beyond three months.
(You don’t have to imagine. We have a Balanced Nutrition archive, accessible at the top of this page, and via this link here, that gives you all the info you need to answer that question.)
So why is the Mark Robinson / Balanced Nutrition matter being treated like a skunk at a garden party? It’s a bipartisan problem. State Republicans are going through serious Robinson fatigue. Nobody on that side of the aisle wants to have any more dealings with him. It was Roy Cooper‘s NC DHHS that allowed the mess at Balanced Nutrition to grow and fester. It was Josh Stein‘s job as AG to investigate and prosecute stuff like this. Reopening the books on this story shines a light on failures on both sides of the aisle. It could also implicate more folks on both sides of the aisle.
North Carolina doesn’t have all the Somalis Minnesota has. The current scandal there appears to be on a much larger scale, as well. But the defrauded program there sounds quite similar to the program at the heart of the Mark Robinson / Balanced Nutrition mess.
You could look at this federally-funded program in every state and come up with some appalling findings. Don’t the American taxpayers from coast-to-coast deserve some justice from this?
Instead of trying to make things right with the taxpayers, Mark Robinson had decided to go right back to the ranting that made him famous in the first place. He has a Facebook “reel” out there making the rounds on illegal immigration.
In the video, Robinson points out that the people who “did it right” — in terms of immigration — are actually being “cheat[ed]” by those who did not follow the rules regarding immigration. Here’s one of the more interesting quotes from his video rant:
[…] “Do it right. Do it right. Do it right. You should pay the penalty for not doing it right.” […]
My point, exactly.
Pay Up.
I believe it is more correct to say that the fraud in Minnesota is larger than the fraud discovered in NC THUS FAR.
>> “The current scandal there appears to be on a much larger scale, as well.”
I can think of a few organizations in Moore County which wouldn’t withstand much scrutiny.
We also need to do a dig into the huge grants awarded to some of the local grifters who feed off the taxpayer money with businesses that are financed with taxpayer money. STOP the GRIFT!
While your argument that the Balanced Nutrition scandal has been put aside probably is the result of bipartisan collaboration to dump a bipartisan problem, let me play devil’s advocate: is it possible that the whole scandal was contrived and would not go forward if examined with greater scrutiny? Robinson’s demise would clearly be beneficial to the linguini-spined GOP Party Establishment, who always regarded him as too blunt and too “extreme,” as well as to the Democrat party, who loathed his attacks on wokeness. Just speculating.