When Mikey met Harvey
I swear I could almost see this coming. The NCGOP – on behalf of the Whatley campaign – had been beating on Roy Cooper for attending a fundraiser where a convicted sex offender was also in attendance. Meanwhile, Republican US Senate candidate Michael Whatley – while state GOP chairman — had an interesting relationship with a fellow named Harvey West, which is now national news:
For the past six years, conservatives in North Carolina have made the Down East Judicial Picnic a crucial stop on the fundraising circuit. Attendees pay up to $1,500 to chow down on hors d’oeuvres and rub shoulders with state supreme court justices and officeholders.
What some of the attendees knew was that the host, Harvey L. West, had a dark past.
In 1999, West was a police officer in a small town near the Outer Banks when he was arrested and charged with the statutory rape of three girls — two were aged 14 and one was 16. He eventually took a deal, pleading guilty to a string of lesser charges of “taking indecent liberties with a child.” After six years in prison, his name went on to the state’s sex-offender register, where it stayed until 2018.
Now, Michael Whatley, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for Senate, who attended these fundraisers, finds himself embroiled in a scandal that couldn’t have come at a worse time. He is under pressure to answer why he twice appointed West to one of the state party’s top rule-making bodies and allowed him to hold such a central role.
The matter casts a cloud not just over Republican efforts to hold the Senate seat being vacated by Thom Tillis, one of the key targets for Democrats hoping to flip the upper chamber, but all sorts of downballot races.
Democrats have been running their eye over photographs from the picnic, dripping out attacks on anyone who attended. Not to mention that it was a fundraiser for judicial candidates, for whom any sense of rubbing shoulders with felons might be a career ender.
But it’s not just Democrats who are asking questions. It is infuriating to people such as Michele Woodhouse, a GOP stalwart in the state’s 11th District, where she ran for Congress in 2021.
“There have been quite a few of us who have been ringing the bell on this for years,” she told Secrets. “We were just met with kind of ‘the good old boys network’ resistance and told it was no big deal. ‘Nothing to see here.’”
The result, she added, was that any official or candidate who attended the picnic is facing “blowback.”
“And you know, Michael Whatley has not denounced this at all,” she added.
West launched his picnic in 2020, two years after coming off the sex offenders’ register. At the time, he was chairman of the 1st Congressional District committee.
His status only grew as the picnic went from strength to strength.
When Whatley took over as state party chairman in 2019, he twice appointed West to one of its most important bodies, the Plan of Organization Committee.
“Why did Michael appoint him to the Plan of Organization Committee … twice? And then kind of doubling down on the picnic,” said Woodhouse, pointing out it had been renamed the North Carolina Judicial Picnic to mark its statewide impact.
“Those are questions that Michael Whatley really should answer.”
So far, Whatley has declined to answer. His campaign did not respond to Secrets’s questions about how long he had known about West’s past or whether he regrets being involved with a convicted sex offender.
For his part, West resigned as chairman of the Republican 1st District Congressional as the controversy grew.
“People make mistakes, they serve their time, and they come back,” West told WRAL. “Isn’t that the whole point of rehabilitation, so they can go back into the community and serve?”
Back in 2012, West said he didn’t commit the crimes and only pleaded guilty to avoid spending decades in jail.
The state party is unrepentant about West’s role and has gone on the attack.
Matt Mercer, a spokesman for the state GOP, said: “People in glass houses should be very careful when it comes to working with and taking photos with and doing things with convicted child sex offenders.”
Last week, the party sent out a press release asking whether Roy Cooper, the former governor and the 2026 Democratic candidate for Senate, had promoted a child sex offender. It offered photographs of him at a 2018 LGBT awards gala, which was hosted by Chad Sevearance-Turner, a former youth minister who served a two-year sentence for lewd conduct with a child under the age of 16 in 2000.
None of it seems to be helping. Poll after poll puts Whatley behind Cooper in their race.
[…]
Here’s a snippet of an interview on WFAE radio about this story with WRAL political reporter Paul Specht:
[…] Terry: Last week, the GOP accused Whatley’s opponent in this year’s Senate race, Democrat and former Gov. Roy Cooper, of “hanging out” with a convicted sex offender named Chad Turner. What are they referring to there?
Specht: That was one of the things that the North Carolina Republican Party responded with when I reached out to them. They said there is a man named Chad Turner. He leads a LGBTQ+ chamber of commerce in Charlotte and Cooper at one point attended the organization’s end-of-year party and is seen in a photo with Mr. Turner, who we also reached out to and didn’t receive a response from. The Cooper campaign responded and said we don’t view these two as the same. They said, I’m paraphrasing, attending an event where someone else is is not the same as appointing someone to a party committee.
Terry: Normally, I ask you how you rated these claims, but you didn’t assign a rating this time. Why not?
Specht: We felt it was more important to just lay out what we knew. We reached out to all these people involved. Here’s what they told us, and people can read and decide for themselves what they think. […]
And, of course, the North Carolina Democrat Party is having a field day with the West-Whatley story.
