Questions Remain About Ray Pickett's Participation in an Expenses Paid "Bourbon Tour"

 

Rep. Ray Pickett

 

WEDNESDAY, April 22, 2026: Four Raleigh lobbyists -- 

Douglas Bowen “Bo” Heath, a lobbyist for McGuireWoods,

Douglas P. Miskew, a lobbyist for Public Sector Group,

David Ferrell, a lobbyist for Maynard Nexsen PC,

Kevin Wilkinson, the president of The Southern Group --

were indicted in Wake County for arranging illegal gifts for Republican members of the General Assembly -- under NC law, misdemeanors. These four dudes are alleged to have invented a "dark money" PAC called Greater Carolina under whose name certain lawmakers were given treats, like all-expenses-paid and no-behavior-barred "Kentucky Bourbon trips." The whiskey tours were covers for a distillery industry's lobbying for favorable legislation. Just today, the Raleigh prosecutor issued a very detailed search warrant of Greater Carolina's finances (Will Doran). The warrant says Greater Carolina spent almost $80,000 on golf outings, a little tickle-dick at strip clubs, and expensive tickets to Carolina Panthers games, but it does not name any lawmakers nor even allege that members of the General Assembly benefitted from any of those activities.

State law bans lobbyists from providing any sort of gift to an elected official, either directly or indirectly.

No current or former members of the General Assembly have been charged with anything. The Bourbon travel generosity of Greater Carolina for members of the House became more widely public because a server at a Kentucky distillery published a "gee whiz!" comment on Reddit, alleging that the North Carolina crew were loud and obnoxious, "being extremely rude, disruptive, not tipping the bartenders and tour guides, and even VOMITING in our bathroom sinks."

Watauga County's House Representative, Ray Pickett of Blowing Rock, was on the 2022 tour, but whether he was a ralpher-in-the-sink remains unknown.

Sen. Tim Moffitt, who went on the 2022 Bourbon tour, actually reported it as a gift on his Statement of Economic Interest (SEI), a form required yearly by the state's Ethics Commission. Moffitt's disclosure led to questions about the other GA whiskey tourists, like Ray Pickett. Did he report it? Here's the relevant questions on all of Pickett's SEI filings since 2022:

14. During 2024, after you were appointed, employed, or filed or were nominated as a candidate, did you

 receive any “gift(s)” exceeding $200 per quarter from a person or group of persons acting together,
 when both you and those person(s) were outside North Carolina,
 under circumstances that would lead a reasonable person to conclude the gifts were given for lobbying?
To answer Yes, all three conditions must apply

☐ Yes ☒ No

15. During 2024, after you were appointed, employed, or filed or were nominated as a candidate, did you

 accept a “scholarship” exceeding $200 related to your public position from a person or group of persons acting
together,
 when those person(s) were outside North Carolina?
To answer Yes, both conditions must apply
A “scholarship” is a grant-in-aid, either direct or indirect, to attend a conference, meeting, or similar
event, including tuition, travel, lodging, meals, and other similar expenses.

☐ Yes ☒ No ☐ Judicial Officer - You are not required to complete this question if you are filing solely because you are a legislator or judicial officer or as a candidate or appointee to those offices

Hmmm. Are there other shoes to drop, and when might we expect that?

 

Maine Man

 

Troy Jackson -- AP

  

Lot of reading to do right now about Troy Jackson, Graham Platner's replacement as the Dems Senate candidate in Maine. (His nomination is not official yet, but every news source is saying Jackson has it sewn up. Four other would-be candidates dropped out and endorsed him. Delegates vote this coming Saturday.) 

Jackson's "Beefeater face"* shouldn't mislead you that he hasn't been both a working man and a man of action. His mother was 16 when he was born, his father a struggling logger like his own male forebears going back three generations. The Jackson men all "went to the woods." Troy made a living loading and hauling cut timber for corporate growers as an employee. The growers got together, changed the haulers from employees to contract workers (the First Shafting), and then in 1998 imported a bunch of Canadian sawyers, who were cheaper labor because of the exchange rate and because they're covered by Canadian socialized medicine. Hiring the Canadians was illegal under U.S. law. Jackson joined others to organize a week-long blockade at the border with Quebec in 1998 to thwart the corporations. Jackson and two other ringleaders got led away in handcuffs, escorted off the property, told they were banned from it for life, and then let go.

Instead of strictly going away, Jackson got catapulted into politics. He first ran unsuccessfully as a Republican, was first elected to office as an Independent, and then joined the Democratic Party in 2004. Deciding that having a hand in law-making was far more useful than protests, Jackson first ran and won a seat in the Maine House of Reps in 2000 and won, switched his focus in 2002 and ran successfully for Maine Senate, held the seat until term limits ousted him in 2008, came back immediately in 2010 to run successfully again for the Maine House, went back to the Maine Senate in 2012 and remained there through December 2024 when term limits once again caught him. The Senate clearly suited him, and he could get stuff done, important progressive stuff like passing statewide free breakfast and lunch for every public school kid in the state, like improving funding for rural hospitals, like protecting union workers, and keeping Maine a pro-choice state. When he was term-limited out in 2024, he had risen in prominence, elected by his peers as Democratic Leader and then President of the Senate. 

He's one determined Yeoman Warder. He ran in the Democratic primary for Governor this year and came in third. Throughout his political career, he has been resolutely progressive, and already the right is braying about Democratic Socialists. Good!

Jackson is described as blunt and sometimes profane (I wouldn't expect anything less from a Mainer!). He's personally well liked across party lines, seen as authentic rather than polished, regarded as unusually knowledgeable about legislative procedure, viewed as "the real deal" on labor issues, and can be criticized for lacking charisma. He can't compare to Graham Platner there.

 

Jackson has to now raise a lot of money to compete with Susan Collins. He's better known out of the gate than Platner was, who had to build a following by showing up everywhere. His combat-ready aura may be enough -- that and the insurgency that Platner ignited -- may be enough to overcome the charisma deficit.

 

*Beefeater face: the jowly, rudy, well-fed look of the Tower of London's Yeoman Warders. 

 

Watauga's Own "Four" Eggers Shuts Down Investigation into Dallas Woodhouse's Voter Suppression Activities

 

Photo Jesse Barber

 

Last Thursday, with Stacy C. Eggers IV ("Four") presiding over the State Board of Elections (SBOE), Jeff Carmon, one of two Democratic members, spoke about the allegations that preceded Dallas Woodhouse's resignation as Auditor Dave Boliek's enforcer ("liaison") to all county boards, going over and around the actual staff at the SBOE. It had become well established that Woodhouse was behind orders in some specific counties advising the closing of early voting at college campuses and an end to Sunday voting in Black communities.

“Given the seriousness of these allegations and the public attention that they have generated, I believe we have an obligation to establish a complete and factual record,” Carmon said. “At this stage, I believe the board has little choice but to subpoena Mr. Woodhouse so that he may answer questions under oath.”

Eggers was horrified and shut that shit down quickly, refused to allow a vote on a subpoena for Woodhouse, arguing hilariously that it would be inappropriate to go after Woodhouse now because he's resigned his job and is a private citizen. What? When Carmon pointed out that Woodhouse's official actions were the point, not his private behavior, Eggers retreated to a threat, warning Carmon that he'd better "drop it," before the Republican majority called for investigating people who ran the SBOE for Roy Cooper and Josh Stein. (Will Doran, WRAL)

This is the same Four Eggers who secretly directed efforts to suppress the college vote in Watauga in 2013 after his younger brother was installed as the chair of the Watauga BOE. Bertrand Gutierrez scooped that scandal for the Winston-Salem Journal, and I used up a lot of bandwidth writing about Mr. Eggers and his attempt to change the entire landscape of voting in Watauga County. The first meeting of the Watauga BOE after the Republicans took over, August 12, 2013, a huge crowd had been alerted that something bad was about to go down. The meeting room was standing room only, so they moved to the main courtroom. The Republican majority proceeded to pass a dozen or more "resolutions" (changes in policy) that were proven later by digital thumbprint to have been ghost-written by the chair's big brother Four. One of those resolutions closed early voting at AppState. That meeting, with that crowd, became a raucous circus of protest, with cat-calling and boos. The lone Democratic member of the Watauga BOE said damn twice, and it was captured on video. The Civitas people alleged that the Democratic member "cursed through the whole meeting." An exaggeration that nevertheless summarizes adequately the vibe of that day.

That decision to close AppState early voting, on appeal, was upheld by the SBOE, also Republican majority at that time. A non-profit, the Watauga County Voting Rights Taskforce, and individual plaintiffs, sued in Wake Superior Court to restore the student union site. On October 13, 2014, literally on the eve of the start of early voting for the fall elections of 2014, the senior resident judge Donald Stephens issued a sharply worded decision declaring the Watauga BOE's shutdown at AppState "arbitrary and capricious." The next morning, and just as quickly as the judge had ruled, the staff of the Watauga BOE was set up in the student union and ready for early voting. We were first in line. And we've had early voting on the AppState campus ever since because a judge ordered it. (Q. Does a judge's order have a limited lifespan? How is that determined?)

Couldn't do it in Watauga in 2014. But willing to let Dallas Woodhouse do it in 2026. Same "Four" Eggers.

 

The Blimp That Dared the Lightning

 

I've been collecting individual impressions of the Trump speech last night -- because no way am I tuning that shite in, though I can't avoid for long the substance of what the con man sez, just in case. Several have mentioned the lifeless delivery, as though he had someplace to be and had (at long last!) lost interest in the 2020 election. Lucian K. Truscott IV caught the vibe: "Trump didn’t believe a word of it." 

I think that's accurate. He's a man so thoroughly false and fake that all his utterances and gestures can only be understood as parts of a big con, a "patriotic" dumb show of bilkery, a living version of Herman Melville's novel The Confidence-Man, wherein a mysterious stranger boards a Mississippi steamboat and manipulates the passengers by exploiting their trust, vanity, greed, and prejudices [A.I. assist for the summary].

Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani "and the rest of the half-baked half-wits who filed lawsuits challenging the election results in 2020" (Truscott) introduced affidavits ("statements" not taken under oath) alleging (for example) that somebody saw an election worker in Georgia hand a flash drive to another worker. No followup, because, for example in the Georgia instance when someone bothered to ask more questions, the alleged flash drive turned out to be a breath mint. "Somebody heard." "Somebody saw." Mere statements without substance or proof, yet perfect for the Fox News hounds of our Republic who, abandoning all hope, believe what the con man says because all other gods have failed to deliver.

Trump spent much of his 25 minutes telling the folks that he has ordered declassified all the long-hidden secrets about the stuff that happened in 2018 and some stuff that happened in 2019 and then all came to a head in 2020 when all the conspirators succeeded in rigging the election -- for all those years, 2018, 2019, and 2020 -- Trump was president. All the relevant agencies he now wants to finger were under his control, appointed by him. But what do the Fox News hounds know? They peer into those now muddy waters and figger it must have been Biden who done it.

He's so clearly desperate to protect his own ass that he's willing to sic the January Sixth Types, or ICE, or the National Guard on whole communities that are known to detest him and his policies. Everyone expects the worst, come November. While I don't think he's going to discourage a single Democrat or left-leaning Independent -- they'll get themselves to the polls over hot coals, if that's what it takes, through barbed wire barricades and fields of open gunfire, and they'll vote against every Republican on any and every ballot in every county, district, and state. Some Republicans will stay home, either embarrassed past the breaking point by this president or newly uninspired or completely turned off by the Iran War (or any dozen other possible motives for disaffection in trumpland).

He's a mess. Flailing his arms maybe to scatter the odor of his own mortality. But falling asleep, dozing off, checking out when anyone else but him has something to report. How can this great over-inflated Hindenburg not crash and burn?

He Loved Those McDonald's

 

Congressman Chuck Edwards of the 11th CD put out a press release yesterday that he and his wife Teresa have sold all their McDonald's restaurants in Henderson, Transylvania, and Haywood counties to good friends in Asheville who are already McDonald's franchisees. The Edwardses owned seven McDonald's, according to the letter that Teresa addressed to Leslie Boyd, banning her from entering all of them because Boyd was leading a boycott. 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to the Congressman himself, Teresa Edwards has been essentially the general manager of all the restaurants ever since Edwards was first elected to the NC Senate a decade ago. The demands got very much heavier after Edwards went to Washington in the 2022 elections. The responsibilities Teresa Edwards carried might crush a young person, let-alone a 65-year-old woman who had helped Chuck build the McDonald's empire over four decades. I can see selling out of that treadmill and retiring.

But retiring ain't in the cards right now.

The Congressman is locked in a reelection death-match with good-old-boy Democrat Jamie Ager, with various polls and pundits suggesting Edwards would be suddenly vulnerable in a Blue Wave. Plus bad press has dogged Edwards. Hurricane Helene survivors -- and they are legion in his district -- have not stopped biting his ankles over the paltry Trump admin treatment of the region, and now he's under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for wholly inappropriate contact and interaction with 20-something girl staffers.

Selling a highly profitable and beloved set of restaurants takes on the odor of panic, doesn't it? Beloved? Edwards has talked about how, at the age of 16, he went to work at a McDonald's that he later was able to buy, and he took justifiable pride in the kind of joy he was able to bring to his customers for over 40 years. He has put his bone and blood into building that chain of franchises, so selling out must hurt more than a little. Does he need to juice his campaign budget, because fundraising has been lagging? (Trump doesn't seem likely to chip off a chunk of his gigantic MAGA Inc. fund -- reportedly at least $350,000,000 -- which Trump appears to be hoarding for himself. But of course he would.)

Selling those restaurants at just this time draws attention to itself as something quite extraordinary.

 

High Rage Threshold, for a Monday

 

Gov. Stein signed the budget last week

 

 

Dylan Halper, an intern at The Assembly, went through all 634 pages of the new state budget (so I didn't have to) and highlighted some of the earmarks, many of which don't offend me, like 

$31 million to the North Carolina Museum of History

$4 million to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences 

$4.4 million to the North Carolina Museum of Art

$750,000 to the Museum of the Marine

$100,000 to the North Carolina Pottery Museum in Randolph County

I even smile about highly specific earmarks for very local gigs, like the $20,000 the budget gives to the tiny town of Fremont in Wayne County for its annual Daffodil Festival, which goes back to the late 1950s. I'm for supporting that because it's community-building and it spotlights flowers. This budget originated in the NC Senate. Buck Newton represents Fremont in the Senate. I can applaud Buck Newton if he funneled that measly $20k to the daffodils.

Intern Halper picked up on the tension between state-funded higher education and the GOP powers in the General Assembly and found in the budget what might be an anomaly: "The claws are not out for North Carolina State University. It will receive $20 million for its Commercial Leap Ahead for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors (CLAWS) Hub, which is researching a type of semiconductor technology that the university says could be more effective than traditional silicon." [italics added]

It's too bad that our Republican government continues to fund crisis pregnancy centers to the tune of $1.5 million. Those places are Christian propaganda mills that have been shown to push "inaccurate information" on desperate girls who don't know what to do. Another $3.3 million is going to a more interesting anti-abortion org with a "continuum of care," which pairs women experiencing unplanned pregnancies with a social worker to “help address the circumstances prompting her to seek an abortion.” On its face, that sounds helpful to me.

I like that there's a million dollars in the budget to protect the OBX wild horses and $50k to support the activities of a non-profit therapeutic horse-riding school. But the $100,000 going to UNC-Wilmington's all-female equestrian club gives me pause, especially after I spent some time on their Facebook page. It appears to be, in very frequent photo arrays, a mainly white sorority with one Black member. That 100k is for horse feed, I suspect -- the club actually owns 8 horses, according to Halper -- but that's still a lot of oats for a social club.

One budget entry that Halper found also stopped me cold: $90,000 for a pickleball court in the town of Godwin, population 128. Tom McInnis (R) represents Godwin in the NC Senate, where the budget bill originated. But Diane Wheatley represents Godwin in the House, and she might have had some influence. According to its demographics, Godwin is an aging, low-income, sedentary community of almost equal numbers of Black and white (over 45% Black), and any space for recreation can be a blessing.

It makes sense to spend $30 million on keeping the Greensboro Coliseum (which now goes under the name of First Horizon) up-to-date and up-to-grade, because of the general economic benefit of Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments held there once a year. 

And I can applaud the $109 million + that goes to expand the medical school at East Carolina State University (which I think probably accounts for the white coats you see arrayed behind the governor at the signing ceremony, photo above) and $15 million to the Methodist University Cape Fear Valley Health School of Medicine in Fayetteville.

You Think That Rearranging Furniture at the SBOE Absolves It of Corruption? Dallas Woodhouse Still Works There!

 

NC Voices

 

The cover story Dave Boliek put out in September 2025 about hiring Dallas Woodhouse as some sort of State Board of Elections (SBOE) "liaison," whose role, we would soon discover -- to absolutely no one's surprise -- was actually to lord it over county boards of elections and inhibit college-age and Black voters wherever possible. At the time of Woodhouse's hiring, Boliek announced him to county election officials: "[I hired] him to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections." Hahahahaha

The best reporting I've seen on the Woodhouse "reassignment" at the SBOE, the piece below, is thorough and complete. I don't know who wrote it, but thank you!

And if you're a partisan like me and tempted to celebrate the mere rearrangement of furniture at the SBOE -- window-dressing for a corrupt and exposed operation -- I would advise you not to. Dallas Woodhouse is still there at the SBOE, along with his embedded philosophy of might-makes-right, and trailing all that heavy baggage of cut-throat politics. You think the people who hired Woodhouse and who now obviously depend on him to be there have changed their spots? This isn't a victory, but it exposed their corruption. 

RALEIGH -- By WRAL News  A North Carolina Republican operative who was hired by the state auditor to help shape the state’s election boards and early voting plans has been reassigned, and his election liaison position has been discontinued. 

State and county elections officials are beginning to ramp up preparations for the 2026 midterm elections. Mail-in ballots will go out in September, early voting starts in October and election day is Nov. 3.

State Auditor Dave Boliek reassigned Dallas Woodhouse, a former executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party, NBC News reported Wednesday morning. Woodhouse had served in the role since September.

“Now that we are more than a year past appointments, and board chairs have settled into their roles having worked through a municipal election, primary election, and most of the local boards have passed early voting plans for the general election, the Auditor's Office has discontinued the elections liaison role,” a spokesman for the auditor’s office told WRAL in a statement Wednesday. “The elections liaison was established because the Auditor's Office gained new responsibilities. The position was not meant to be permanent.”

Woodhouse will work on strategic initiatives that relate to constituent services and communications, according to the spokesman.

Republican state lawmakers stripped responsibility for overseeing state and county election boards away from Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in 2024 and gave the power to Boliek, a Republican. Under Boliek and Woodhouse, the state board of elections and all 100 county election boards have switched to GOP majorities, and some have begun enacting longtime Republican priorities such as eliminating early voting options on Sundays — a popular day with Black voters and on college campuses. Black voters and students tend to vote Democratic.

According to reporting from WLOS and NC Local, Woodhouse and Boliek were involved in efforts to ensure the new Jackson County Board of Elections would shut down a polling place on campus at Western Carolina University. In the Triangle, the Wake County Board of Elections also recently voted to eliminate a longtime early voting site at N.C. State’s student union, and to move it to a remote part of campus, WRAL previously reported.

Woodhouse was reassigned on June 2, NBC News reported. Woodhouse earns $110,000, according to a database of state employee salaries.

In September, Boliek wrote to some county election officials that “to assist in your efforts to ensure election integrity while encouraging maximum participation in our elections, I have appointed Dallas Woodhouse as my liaison.”

Woodhouse referred a request for comment Wednesday to the auditor’s office.

 

Dallas Woodhouse Causes Embarrassment, But what Dallas Woodhouse Stood For Still Very Much the Philosophy at the State Board of Elections

Big news this afternoon: Dallas Woodhouse, who has a history of trying to knee-cap college students' voting and Sunday voting for African-Americans, has been "reassigned" in the State Board of Elections. Instead of his $110,000 per annum job of "advising" local county boards of elections -- principally, advising the Republican majorities to eliminate campus polling places where possible and stop Sunday voting in communities with large Black congregations, Woodhouse has been reassigned to a desk in another part of the SBOE.

But it's all window-dressing, and it means nothing. The attitude toward suppressing certain voters still reigns in Auditor's Dave Boliek's MAGA brain. Woodhouse had caused Mr. Boliek some very bad optics after he was revealed telling the chair of the Jackson County Board of Elections, "Don't let them have a vote," them being students at Western Carolina University who had become accumstomed to a student union early voting site. There's also evidence that he told the Pasquotank County Bd of Elections chair to eliminate Sunday voting.  Pasquotank County is 35% Black.

The leopards can white-wash their spots, but they're still going to be blood predators.

 

I Guess We're All Communists Now

 

Trump repeated the word Communist so many times yesterday -- with the four granite-faced Presidents above him, averting their eyes -- that you might have thought it was 1950. On February 9th of that fatal year, Sen. Joseph McCarthy held up some pieces of paper in front of the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, and whined in that reedy, unpleasant voice of his, "I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Women cringed. One of them fainted. There were dropped salad forks all over the room.

The witch hunt was on!

The suspicion of Communism crept through the American bloodstream, or rather raced like a fulminating virus, fanned into white-hot intensity by the John Birch Society. Birchers were all over the Panhandle of Texas. By the time I was in the 7th and 8th grades in the late '50s, popular fright-sayings about Communists and Communism, preached relentlessly by members of the Society, had reached my level of pre-social-media gossip. The Birchers were particularly good at ferreting out school textbooks with "Communist propaganda." What in particular was Communist propaganda? Any acknowledgement of a struggle for civil rights among America's Blacks.

I was a very religious kid to boot, so I could fall prey to a pamphlet that appeared in 1960 warning of a likely "Catholic takeover" if John F. Kennedy became President. The anti-Catholic thing was closely allied with the anti-Communist thing -- Baptists predominated, and there ain't no Baptists like Texas Baptists. There were plenty of Texans who didn't mind saying out loud, and loudly, as Texans sometimes speak when provoked, that Kennedy was an N-word-loving goddamn Communist. That's why Texans of a gentler nature so rued the terrible event in Dallas. Why did it have to be Texas! Poor dumb, damn Texas.

To the Communist-baiting Texans in the Panhandle, one of the worst things the Catholic President Kennedy did in his short presidency was the diplomatic breakthrough called "the Chamizal Conventions," a land-exchange between the U.S. and Mexico that Kennedy successfully negotiated. The Chamizal "situation" had been a sore point since 1864, when a particularly severe flood changed the course of the Rio Grande and stranded over 600 acres of Mexico on the north side of the river. This led to a history of incursions and takings and dyspeptic relations between countries. Kennedy resolved it quickly, agreeing to give back to Mexico some 366 acres of the original Chamizal tract and an additional 264 acres near the adjacent Cordova Island, while taking for the U.S. the other 193 acres of Cordova Island. That international boundary still stands today.

Kennedy negotiated the agreement, but it fell to President Johnson to carry it out in stages, and those stages included some Texans' getting mighty exercised that their land was being unfairly, unconstitutionally, and communistically taken from them. I remember reading up on the history at the time and writing a letter to the editor of the Plainview Herald supporting the Mexican position. I was being a very fair-minded little Christian and budding historian to reach that conclusion. I was told later by a classmate of mine who also worked as part-time receptionist for an insurance agent that her boss had a file folder labeled "Suspected Communists" and that he had instructed her to put my letter to the editor -- which he had patiently clipped from the Herald -- into that file. Apparently, I've been a Communist since I was 18.

We label what we fear, and so does Trump. He doesn't fear Communists. That's just the scare-word he remembers from his own childhood -- he and I are the same age, give or take. What Trump fears and chooses to label with an old insult is the surge of voting enthusiasm for the men and women who have been winning elections on the Democratic side and sometimes upending apple carts of more conservative members of their Party -- the brave and outspoken "progressives," the sometimes self-described "socialist Democrats." That's what he fears, being charged and tried by new politicians who have power because they have followings.