'Drop this story': Red state GOP shocks with threat to reporter of Trump retaliation

Republican Party officials are now using their “connections” to the Trump administration to threaten journalists into dropping critical coverage.

That’s what Doug Bock Clark, a reporter for ProPublica, recently discovered as he worked on a feature-length story on the rise of Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, who has become one of the most quietly influential jurists in the nation.

The piece published Thursday examines how Newby, a born-again Christian who was elected to the bench in 2004, believes he was called by God to exact what he calls “biblical justice.”

Over the past two decades, Clark wrote that Newby has “turned his perch atop North Carolina’s Supreme Court into an instrument of political power” and “driven changes that have reverberated well beyond the borders of his state.”

Newby’s most significant contribution has been the landmark decision that legalized partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina, a state that had long had some of the strongest laws in the country against partisan redistricting.

The change led the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to draw up wildly slanted maps that netted the GOP an additional six seats in the US House of Representatives in 2024, handing the party a national trifecta at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, which has allowed him to wield extraordinary power almost totally free of oversight from Congress.

It’s just one of the ways, Clark said, that “Newby has provided a blueprint for conservatives to seize most of the nation’s state supreme courts, which have increasingly become the final word on abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights and voting rights.”

The report drew from more than 70 interviews with those who know Newby professionally and personally. But he was unable to get in contact with Newby himself.

“I reached out to Newby multiple times during the course of my reporting and was even escorted out of a judicial conference while trying to interview him,” Clark wrote on social media. “The court’s communications director and media team also didn’t respond to detailed questions.”

When Clark attempted to contact Newby’s daughter for comment, he instead received an ominous message from that aforementioned communications director, Matt Mercer.

Mercer ranted that ProPublica was waging a “jihad” against “NC Republicans,” which would “not be met with dignifying any comments whatsoever.”

He continued: “I’m sure you’re aware of our connections with the Trump administration, and I’m sure they would be interested in this matter. I would stronglysuggest dropping this story.”

As Clark pointed out, “He bolded and underlined ‘strongly,’ in case we missed his point.”

After the story, which made note of Mercer’s threat, was published, Mercer then doubled down on social media, urging Trump to “feed ProPublica to the USAID wood chipper,” referencing the president’s near-total stripping of funds from the foreign aid agency.

Trump has issued an executive order slashing federal funds for media organizations supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, like NPR and PBS, in response to critical coverage of his administration. But it’s not entirely clear how he would actually go about doing such a thing to ProPublica, which does not receive government dollars but instead subsists on private grants and donations.

At any rate, Mercer’s messages were widely perceived as a not-so-veiled attempt to coerce ProPublicainto ceasing its inquiries.

Travis Fain, a freelance reporter who previously worked for Raleigh’s NBC News affiliate, WRAL, expressed disbelief at Mercer’s belligerence on social media: “Well, there you go,” he said. “The North Carolina Republican Party officially threatens journalists now.”

Wiley Nickel, the former Democratic US House representative for North Carolina’s 13th District, lamented that it was “not normal” for a party official to “threaten ProPublica with retaliation from Trump” for writing a profile about another GOP official.

Despite the threats, Clark says “ProPublica persisted” with the story that Mercer “warned [it] not to tell.”

“I’m always amazed when grown-ups with jobs say things like this to journalists,” said Jessica Huseman, a former ProPublica reporter. “Like, do you think that’s gonna do anything but make us more eager to publish the story?”