In new reporting from the News & Observer, DC insider Michael Whatley was caught lying AGAIN in an attempt to cover up his support for the court-ordered settlement that forced North Carolina to increase inmate releases during the pandemic – the same settlement that he’s made his “main attack” against Roy Cooper, despite these attacks being fact checked as false.

During the pandemic, the NCGOP, under Whatley’s leadership, said: “Cooper only took COVID in prison seriously when a judge ordered him to.” In response to recent reporter questions, Whatley attempted to explain away his past comments by claiming he was referring to vaccines, masks, and social distancing. But vaccines weren’t even available at the time Whatley made his comments – and that same month, he criticized an ad from the state’s health department that encouraged masks and social distancing.

Six years later, Whatley took the opposite position for political gain and when he got caught, he tried and failed to lie his way out of it.

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News & Observer: Whatley’s COVID-era comments on prisons raise more questions in race vs. Cooper

Danielle Battaglia | July 15, 2026

• Did U.S. Senate candidate Michael Whatley want North Carolina prisoners released during the COVID-19 pandemic? 
• In July 2020, Whatley sat for a roundtable in Catawba County surrounded by Republican leaders including then-state Rep. Jason Saine. And he told his audience Cooper “did not act to protect folks in prisons, so we have had a significant spike among the prison population as well as prison guards …” 
• The state Republican Party, led at the time by Whatley, put out a news release that same week saying that Cooper only took COVID in prison seriously when a judge ordered him to. 
• He told McClatchy during a news conference in Raleigh last week that when he spoke in July 2020, he was not calling on prisoners to be released. 
• “What I was saying was that conditions in prisons needed to be addressed,” Whatley said. “What we saw in many other states was they took steps to address it that involved COVID shots, they involved masks, they involved separation. Certainly, we did not call in any way for there to be a release of prisoners, let alone 4,200 of them, including the worst of the worst, with pedophiles and predators and rapists and murderers.”
• The United States’ first batch of COVID vaccines became available in December 2020, five months after Whatley’s criticism of Cooper that he now ties to using vaccines in the prisons. The state staggered distribution by need and didn’t make vaccines available to everyone over 16 until April 7, 2021. 
• As for masks, Republican officials in North Carolina largely opposed mask mandates. 
• In July 2020, Whatley wrote an op-ed in North State Journal, a conservative news outlet, calling masks “tools” and “important” but not “a plan.” He criticized an ad by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services calling on state residents to mask and stand 6 feet apart. 
• “It’s pretty clear that he has made this COVID prisoner release the center of his political attack, but he’s been caught lying about it time and again,” Cooper said. “I was the one who fought these releases.” 
• “And we know that when he says that he meant that we should have used more vaccines, vaccines didn’t even exist at the time. What this court was talking about was releasing prisoners. And the bottom line is here: I‘m the only one in this race who’s actually prosecuted violent criminals — worked to keep them behind bars …” 
• Cooper went on to criticize Whatley for allowing a convicted sex offender to rise in the ranks within the North Carolina Republican Party, as first reported by Asheville Watchdog.
• However, by 2011, West was appointed to the party’s powerful Plan of Organization committee and would be appointed another nine times. In 2021 and 2024, it was Whatley who made West’s appointment, West said. 
• West said he never hid his convictions from the state party, and some party members, including Michele Woodhouse, fought for years trying to have him removed. 
• It wasn’t until the story broke during Whatley’s campaign that the state’s Republican Party voted to ban sex offenders from holding party office. 

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