phil berger

January 29, 2020 - Longtime elections watchdog Bob Hall has filed a complaint with the state elections board claiming that the Sons of Confederate Veterans' North Carolina Heritage PAC was unlawfully formed and engaged in illegal financing activity. But so far the elected officials who received money from the PAC aren't rushing to return it.

December 18, 2019 - The North Carolina division of the leading neo-Confederate group has a political action committee, and it's spending money to influence legislative and council of state races.

November 20, 2018 - The lame-duck North Carolina legislature convenes Nov. 27 to write a new voter ID law after the version it passed in 2013 was struck down for targeting black voters "with almost surgical precision." The same week, the U.S. Senate could vote to confirm to a federal judgeship a lawyer who helped draft the discriminatory law. 

January 6, 2017 - Passed last March, North Carolina's discriminatory HB2 "bathroom bill" has inflicted major economic damage on the state, costing it more than half a billion dollars as businesses, athletics organizations, film companies and conferences have canceled expansions and events in protest. Here's the latest tally of that lost revenue.

October 14, 2015 - Accusing state regulators and the utility giant of "extraordinary efforts" to marginalize conservation groups' interests in addressing coal ash pollution, the Southern Environmental Law Center has filed a legal action seeking to overturn a controversial settlement reached without the groups' input or knowledge.

September 11, 2015 - An effort is underway to kill a North Carolina law — the only one like it in the region — that requires utilities to generate an increasing amount of electricity from clean sources like solar and wind. Following the money behind what some are calling the "solar haters" campaign leads straight to dirty energy interests.

August 21, 2015 - A two-year investigation by North Carolina's elections board found no campaign finance violations by indicted video poker owners and their lobbyists, but questions remain about other possibly illegal activity by the industry — and about its relationship to Gov. Pat McCrory.