Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, the embattled Republican running for governor there, appeared to suggest in an online comment in 2009 that police officers should have shot the Rev. Al Sharpton, according to a report published on Wednesday by the conservative news site The Bulwark.
“If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton,” wrote a person with the username minisoldr in the comments section of a news article, according to the report. The same username was linked to Mr. Robinson in an initial CNN report that has rocked his campaign.
The New York Times was not able to immediately independently verify the post, which The Bulwark said was posted on the website of NewsOne, which is focused on Black Americans. Those comments and others under the same username were uncovered through a digital archive, The Bulwark reported.
Mr. Robinson’s campaign did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
He has denied making the comments reported last week by CNN, which said that he had once called himself a “black NAZI” and defended slavery as “not bad” on an online pornographic forum. The same report also said he had viciously attacked another civil-rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr.
He has sought to press on with his campaign, even after most of his campaign’s senior staff members resigned on Sunday.
At a campaign stop on Monday, Mr. Robinson denounced the CNN article and said he would take the news organization “to task for what they have done to us.”
Mr. Sharpton said in an interview on Wednesday that the new report in The Bulwark showed that Mr. Robinson was “unhinged,” and expressed concern that the comment could put him in danger. He argued that it should amplify pressure on North Carolina Republicans to abandon Mr. Robinson.
“Aside from the fact that this kind of statement puts a public figure at risk — and I frequent North Carolina — I think that it is raising even more the question how he could be supported by the state Republican Party,” said Mr. Sharpton, a civil-rights leader and a longtime Democrat who hosts a weekend program on MSNBC.
Leading North Carolina Republicans have expressed alarm about the comments linked to Mr. Robinson, and have urged him to disprove that he made them, but have stopped short of pushing him to leave the race. On Tuesday, Mr. Robinson said he had hired a lawyer to investigate the comments.
Former President Donald J. Trump, who once enthusiastically embraced Mr. Robinson, describing him as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” did not bring the lieutenant governor along to a rally in Wilmington, N.C., on Saturday. But he has not publicly urged Mr. Robinson to end his candidacy. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s running mate, declined to denounce Mr. Robinson while campaigning in the state on Monday, but said it was up to Mr. Robinson to convince voters on the matters.
“I’ve seen some of the statements. I haven’t seen them all. Some of them are pretty gross, to put it mildly,” Mr. Vance said at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday, adding, “I think it’s up to Mark Robinson to make his case to the people of North Carolina that those weren’t his statements.”
North Carolina is seen as a key swing state in the presidential election, and if Mr. Robinson performs poorly in his election, it may damage Mr. Trump’s chances of carrying the state. Polling shows that Mr. Robinson appears to have fallen far behind the Democratic candidate for governor, Josh Stein, the North Carolina attorney general.
Senator Thom Tillis, North Carolina’s senior senator and a Republican, told reporters on Tuesday, before the report in The Bulwark, that he planned to wait until the end of the week before deciding whether to urge Mr. Robinson to end his candidacy.
“If any portion of these allegations are true, I consider them to be disqualifying,” Mr. Tillis said of the CNN report. But he added, “I’m at least going to give him an opportunity to assert that they’re not true.”
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