Publicly, the Trump-loving lieutenant governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, has embraced the role of a zealous 2020 election denier.
In April 2021, for instance, Robinson told a crowd that President Joe Biden “stole the election.”
“Yeah, I said that,” Robinson added for effect.
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Days before making that declaration, however, Robinson was privately meeting with one of the highest-profile election deniers in the country: Ginni Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Now, as Robinson ramps up his campaign for North Carolina’s governorship in 2024, documents obtained by The Daily Beast shed light on the extent of his private ties to the movement to contest, overturn, and delegitimize Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election—and it’s clear Robinson is an unabashed, unapologetic election denier running in the same circles as other Republicans showing no repentance for stirring up an insurrection.
In fact, Robinson met with Thomas weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Biden’s inauguration.
According to a copy of Robinson’s official schedule, which was produced through a Freedom of Information Act request, the lieutenant governor had a meeting with Thomas on March 30, 2021.
But Robinson didn’t just speak with Thomas that afternoon; the calendar note indicates he met with Thomas and a group she helped run called Frontliners for Liberty.
Initially a Facebook group that described itself as “a new collaborative, liberty-focused, action-oriented group of state leaders representing grassroots armies,” according to CNBC, Frontliners for Liberty morphed into a key organizing venue for far-right activists nationwide working desperately to keep Trump in power—even after Trump was out of office.
Ultimately, Thomas’ group was influential enough for it to draw the scrutiny of the House Select Committee to Investigate Jan. 6. In December 2020, Trump attorney John Eastman spoke to the group, at Thomas’ invitation, to update them regarding his legal challenges to Biden’s victory. A court-obtained meeting agenda shows Eastman was slated to discuss “state legislative actions that can reverse the media-called election for Joe Biden.”
It’s unclear exactly what Robinson and Thomas discussed in their March 2021 meeting—or exactly who else joined. Since there was no location specified on Robinson’s schedule for the meeting, it may have taken place virtually. Spokespeople for Robinson and Thomas both did not return requests for comment from The Daily Beast.
Even after Biden was inaugurated and the MAGA legal challenges deflated, Thomas and allied far-right activists in her Frontliners group continued to work to undermine the election outcome, according to a Washington Post report—important context for her meeting with Robinson.
Robinson also continued to cast doubt on the election through his rhetoric, if not in any formal government action. (Trump narrowly beat Biden in North Carolina in 2020.) In addition to his April 2021 comments, Robinson used a major speech at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference to claim that Biden didn’t win the election.
Mark Robinson, lieutenant governor of North Carolina arrives at a rally for U.S. Senate nominee Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC).
Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty ImagesAt the gathering, Robinson told activists that 83 million people couldn’t have possibly voted for Biden. “I don’t think 83 million people know who Joe Biden is,” he said. “Joe Biden doesn’t know who Joe Biden is.”
As recently as December 2023, Robinson was also downplaying the violent attack on the Capitol, telling a local GOP club that it was “this minor little thing,” according to audio of the remarks obtained by The Daily Beast.
Robinson’s Trumpian instinct of pushing boundaries in his speech, and reveling in his fans’ acclaim afterward, has been a major factor behind his meteoric rise in North Carolina politics. In 2020, Robinson won the state’s lieutenant governorship with no prior political experience, and he first gained notoriety on the right in 2018, after a pro-gun speech at a Greensboro city council meeting went viral.
Now, Robinson appears to be the GOP favorite to take on Democratic candidate Josh Stein, even though Robinson may be—or potentially because—he’s positioned himself as the most extreme Republican in the field.
As Robinson asks voters for the power to lead one of the country’s perennial battleground states, the news of his 2021 meeting with Thomas and the Frontliners adds to his record undermining an election many Republicans accept they lost and hope to leave behind.
Predictably, Robinson’s campaign for the North Carolina governorship has made the state’s GOP establishment uneasy and delighted the MAGA base. Trump has said he plans to endorse Robinson in the Republican primary. In fact, at a fundraiser he hosted for Robinson in December, the ex-president declared his ally was “better” than Martin Luther King, Jr.
In the GOP primary, Robinson faces businessman Bill Graham, who has won the endorsement of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). If he were to win the primary, Robinson would likely face Attorney General Josh Stein in November. North Carolina is poised to host the most competitive governor race of 2024, with incumbent Gov. Roy Cooper (D) term-limited from running again.
The lieutenant governor’s strident election denialism is just one reason why many operatives—in both parties—believe he could prove toxic in a general election matchup. Few major statewide politicians have amassed a rhetorical record as incendiary and broadly offensive as Robinson.
On his very active Facebook page and elsewhere over the years, Robinson has made a range of comments disparaging Jews, LGBTQ people, Muslims, and women. The deeply homophobic politician has claimed that God “formed” him to fight against LGBTQ rights and has called LGBTQ people “filth.”
In 2018, Robinson said the comic book character Black Panther was created by an “agnostic Jew” to “pull the shekels out of your schvartze pockets”—respectively referring to the Israeli currency and a Yiddish slur for Black people.
In 2020, Robinson conducted an interview with the fringe militant pastor Sean Moon, and expressed his agreement at Moon’s articulation of the conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish bankers controls the world. Both debacles earned Robinson the rebuke of Jewish groups, including the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Previously, Robinson also accused Ellen DeGeneres of being a “top-ranking demon,” blamed Bill Cosby’s conviction on sexual assault charges on the Illuminati, mocked the teenage survivors of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and made fun of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, after he survived a violent attack at his home.
Robinson has essentially never apologized for any of his controversial past statements. He did allow that his remarks on Jews and the Black Panther were poorly phrased, but he has vehemently denied any suggestion they were antisemitic.
In some respects, Robinson has cranked up the volume on his rhetoric since launching his campaign for governor—particularly when it comes to the 2020 election and Jan. 6.
In addition to his comments calling Jan. 6 a “minor little thing,” he has vociferously defended Trump’s efforts to undemocratically remain in power. In a December interview on Newsmax, Robinson said efforts to hold Trump accountable were “despicable.” The former president who was impeached for inciting the violence at the Capitol, Robinson said, “did absolutely nothing wrong, in fact, did everything right for the country.”
Adulation for Trump is one quality that Robinson shares with Thomas, who became an integral figure in the sprawling efforts to keep the former president in office.
A well-known right-wing activist married to an icon of the conservative legal movement, Thomas seemed to descend further into a fever swamp of fringe conspiracies before and after the 2020 presidential election.
The Jan. 6 committee obtained texts sent between Thomas and her friend Mark Meadows, then Trump’s chief of staff, which showed her expressing hope in online predictions that the Bidens, election officials, and journalists would be sent to Guantanamo Bay. She also urged Meadows to do more to support Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud to keep him in office.
Not a great deal is known about Thomas’ Frontliners for Liberty group, other than the fact that it began on Facebook and that Thomas was the administrator of the group page. According to CNBC, it had at least 50 members who Thomas described as “grassroots state leaders.”
On March 6, 2021, Thomas and the Frontliners hosted conservative pundit C.L. Bryant for a speech.
“There is a robbery that is going on in this country right now,” Bryant said, according to The Washington Post. “In fact, I say it to you and I’ll say it loud and clear, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I won’t bite my tongue. I do believe that Donald John Trump is the only legitimate president.”
Three weeks later, Thomas and her group had their meeting with Robinson.
