RALEIGH — Republican U.S. Dan Bishop (NC-08) officially filed his paperwork to run for North Carolina attorney general on Friday, Dec. 8.
Bishop filed alongside multiple state district attorneys, including Mike Hardin (Hoke/Moore) and Andy Gregson (Randolph).
Gregson has been in office since 2017. Hardin is running for a second term.
“I’m going to pursue this office to restore a culture of law and order,” Bishop told North State Journal after filing his candidacy paperwork. “Americans across the country and people in North Carolina are fearful, they’re angry, they’re dismayed by this growing sense of disarray and disorder, certainly most prominently in the criminal law area, but also in other areas as they see sort of an erosion of institutions – or the sort of co-opting of institutions – that cause them to do things that are contrary to law and order.”
While Bishop is the only Republican running for North Carolina attorney general, four Democrats have indicated interest in the state’s top law enforcement spot; Fayetteville lawyer Tim Dunn, Kenansville lawyer Charles Ingram, Congressman Jeff Jackson (NC-14), and Durham District Attorney Santana Deberry.
In speaking with North State Journal, Gregson and Hardin backed Bishop for attorney general and expressly came to file their candidacy paperwork alongside Bishop to underscore their support of his candidacy.
“I’m excited that we have a candidate that has fidelity to the law and, we had a conversation before, and I believe that things are going to change in this state,” said Gregson.
“I’m also here with Dan Bishop… you know, we could have chosen any day this week or next week to file and I wanted to be here with Dan to celebrate the fact that we finally have a Republican running for attorney general that I think can win,” Hardin said.
Hardin said that he hopes to tackle the backlog of cases his office has been working on during his first term.
“Our murderer backlog, I’ve got it within two and a half years now, which has been a big deal since I started off and was handed this district with a seven-year backlog on homicide cases,” Hardin said.
“We’re going to punish criminals,” Gregson said when asked about priorities if reelected. “We are the anti-woke DA’s office and we plan to continue to be that way.”
Hardin echoed Gregson’s “anti-woke DA” sentiment and went on to criticize the politicization of the attorney general’s office.
“What I’ve been tired about this entire time and dealing with… this is 27 years for me… with the attorney general’s office is that it’s been run as a political office,” said Hardin. “It’s not been run with the idea of following the law.”
“And that’s a sad situation when you have an attorney general who’s going to use that office for political purposes just to have an agenda,” Hardin said. “I’ve had my own experiences with Josh Stein. He certainly is agenda-driven and he has had nothing to do with actually following the rule of law.”
Both Gregson and Hardin spoke of other issues with Stein’s leadership as attorney general, such as the lack of application of the death penalty in the state and the rape kit backlog.
“When Josh Stein ran for attorney general, I specifically and personally asked him about getting the death penalty moving and he pledged, in a debate that I witnessed, that he was pro-death penalty,” Gregson said. “We have had two Democratic attorney generals and in that time we’ve not had one single person executed who richly deserves it.”
When asked about the state’s rape kit backlog, which at one point in 2017 was the largest in the nation with over 15,000, Hardin called Stein’s engagement on the issue a “ploy.”
“That was a ploy by Josh Stein when he ran for office against Jim O’Neill and you know, he used that as a tool,” Hardin said referring to Stein’s 2020 campaign ad attack on O’Neill, the Forsyth District Attorney.
During his campaign for attorney general, O’Neill brought up the 15,000 untested kits, alleging Stein had failed to act on during first term as attorney general. Stein then issued a campaign ad accusing O’Neill of letting over a thousand kits go untested despite the state crime lab being responsible for kit testing.
The state crime lab has made some headway reducing the number of the 2017 kit total, however, five years later the backlog persists.
Bishop pointed out some of Stein’s own press releases touting his actions also admitted why certain kits can’t be tested.
“But after he exploited it [rape kit testing] for political purposes, his own news release sort of in the lower paragraphs, discloses that most the kits that were an issue were not susceptible of being tested for some reason or another,” said Bishop. “That’s what D.A. Hardin just made reference to, and that’s the kind of that’s the kind of phoniness and trickery that you see all too often in politics today.”
“But this role is just absolutely an inviting one to bring focus to those efforts,” said Bishop of his run for attorney general. “And that requires listening to these people [the district attorneys] and hearing about their experiences and seeing to it that they are represented in the discussions with the general assembly and I will do that.”
When asked about transparency at the N.C. Department of Justice and the department’s rumored backlog of unfulfilled public records requests, Bishop pledged to make information available.
“Anybody that knows me or that has followed me has observed that I don’t run and hide,” said Bishop, adding that he doesn’t think “executive government should run and hide” either.
“We’re going to make information available and I’m going to make myself available,” Bishop said, adding that he is “happy to take on critics.”
