Raleigh – NCGOP Executive Director Jonathan Sink announced he will leave after only eight months in the position, leaving a scandal-plagued North Carolina Republican Party without a top staffer less than a year before a critical election and just a few months before hosting the Republican National Convention. 

Sink was promoted during a leadership turnover amist former NCGOP Chairman Hayes’ indictment on bribery charges but is now leaving as North Carolina Republicans desperately cling to their majorities in the General Assembly, fight tooth and nail to hold a battleground state crucial to winning the White House, prop up a floundering U.S. Senate candidate with the lowest approval rating of every U.S. Senator, and try to host the Republican National Convention in Charlotte. 

Sink’s surprising departure comes after NCGOP’s leading Gubernatorial candidate Lt. Governor Dan Forest has become entangled in the Greg Lindberg bribery scandal which already took down Chairman Hayes and engulfed the party in scandal. On top of all that, the NC Republican Party raised just half of what the NCDP did in 2019 ($1 mil vs. $2.2 mil). The NCDP holds more than six times comparable cash on hand of the NCGOP ($232K vs. almost $1.5 mil).

WRAL: NC GOP director leaving after 8 months
By Travis Fain
February 5, 2020

• The N.C. Republican Party’s executive director will leave the party after the March primaries, moving on after 8 months in the job.

• Sink said he’ll work with the party until the week before his March 16 start in Gastonia. The primaries are March 3, and the national Republican convention will be held in Charlotte in late August.

• [Party leadership] turned over last year after then Chairman Robin Hayes’ indictment on bribery charges. Sink took the executive director’s job in July, replacing Dallas Woodhouse.

WRAL: Forest aide sought meeting between insurance chief, financier later indicted
By Travis Fain
February 4, 2020

• Lt. Gov. Dan Forest’s chief of staff reached out to Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey’s office in early August 2017, seeking a meeting for two men who would later be indicted and accused of trying to bribe Causey.

• Within a month of the reach out, more than $50,000 flowed into Forest’s campaign coffers from associates of Greg Lindberg and John Gray, at least in part because Lindberg hosted a fundraiser at his home. Lindberg himself donated $400,000 that month to a second political committee that the lieutenant governor controls and that accepts unlimited donations.

• A federal grand jury indicted Lindberg and Gray in March 2019, and it became clear that Causey was working with federal investigators, recording conversations in a case that goes to trial later this month.