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WATCH: North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory Just Got Interviewed on ‘Meet the Press.’ It Didn’t Go Well.

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North Carolina Governor Does Not Bolster His Case

Governor Pat McCrory sat down with NBC News’ Chuck Todd Sunday morning on “Meet the Press.” It didn’t go well. 

The North Carolina Republican has been under increasing pressure for signing HB2, a wide-sweeping anti-LGBT law that bans transgender citizens from utilizing public restrooms that most closely conform to their gender identity, voids all local LGBT nondiscrimination ordinances, and strips local municipalities from passing laws to regulate minimum wages or employment discrimination. 

On Sunday, McCrory told Chuck Todd that he’s facing immense pressure from a group more powerful than the NRA: the Human Rights Campaign. Actually, to be specific, he called HRC the “Human Relations Commission,” proving just how out of touch with their work he is.

And he drew a line in the sand, stating he will not sign a repeal of the “restroom” portion of HB2 – the most contentious portion of a law his own attorney general, and many other legal experts are calling “unconstitutional.”

McCrory also admitted that even though he had been warning the City of Charlotte for months about their proposed nondiscrimination ordinance that ultimately sparked HB2, he had never met with a transgender person to discuss either bill. 

Appearing defensive, McCrory called for more “dialogue,” as he did this week in a Washington Post op-ed. But he bristled when host Chuck Todd reminded him that “you guys debated for, like, one second,” HB2 before passing it. McCrory said the Charlotte City Council’s debate was also short, but it came after a great many hours of listening to testimony from stakeholders, citizens, experts, and nearly anyone else who wished to weigh in. It also came after more than a year of study.

The Governor also claimed that laws surrounding gender identity are new.

“This is a national debate that has literally come on in the last three months,” McCrory told Todd. “No one talked about it until Houston,” referring to that city’s equal right ordinance. That’s of course false. There are reportedly more than 200 laws across the nation that include gender identity.

In perhaps the most curious moment of his “Meet the Press” interview, Gov. McCrory took a swipe at Hollywood, which has come down hard on him for HB2. He suggested they are being hypocritical about LGBT people deserving equal rights because “the new Batman-Robin movie is playing in China,” a country with gross human rights violations.

Another uncomfortable moment came when McCrory boasted that even though corporations are literally moving out of state, taking over 1000 jobs out of state, signing letters urging him to repeal HB2, and entertainers like Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, and Cirque du Soleil are boycotting North Carolina, a few folks at a local “an African American buffet restaurant” recently thanked him.

Watch:

 

EARLIER:

Over 160 CEOs and Business Leaders to North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory: Repeal Anti-LGBT Law HB2

North Carolina Democrat to Introduce Bill to Expand Nondiscrimination Laws to LGBT People

‘Can You Hear Us Now, Pat?’: Awesome ‘Air Horn Orchestra’ Actually HB2 Protest At Governor’s Mansion

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CORRUPTION

Former UnitedHealthcare Employee Says Supervisors Laughed While She Cried About Denying Claims

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UnitedHealthcare building via wikimedia commons

A woman who says she used to work at UnitedHealthcare said that her supervisors would laugh when she would cry at her desk about being forced to deny claims.

Natalie Collins appeared on NewsNation Prime on Saturday after a video she made went viral on TikTok. In the original viral video, she talked about her time working as a customer service representative for UMR, a division of UnitedHealthcare. She said the company taught her “so many different ways to deny” claims.

@motherskeeperdoula2023

Replying to @junedoulaservices My medical claim story with UMR. It was horrible working for them. Horrible management that were out for blood and money.

♬ original sound – Mother’s Keeper Doula

In the original viral video, Collins talks about working at UMR for about nine months, with two to three months spent in training. The bulk of the video is about her dealing with a woman who had lost her husband to pancreatic cancer. UnitedHealthcare was refusing to pay her claims and had sued her. Collins said that the claims totaled more than $400,000, and that the company expected the client—a newly single mother with five children—to pay it. Collins said when she finally got approval to apply some funds for this case, she did so and immediately resigned.

READ MORE: Luigi Mangione’s Attorney Blasts Eric Adams: ‘Mayor Should Know More Than Anyone of the Presumption of Innocence’

She went into more detail about her time working at UnitedHealthcare in the Saturday night interview with NewsNation host Natasha Zouves. Collins describes being told to “get the client off the phone as fast as we could.” She also says the company would use ways to reroute claims back into a processing queue to delay payment as long as possible.

“If [the client wasn’t] liking what we were saying from the script, then we would just call a supervisor, and they would stand behind us. And while I was crying, they were laughing,” Collins said.

“You would actually cry on the job sometimes?” Zouves asked.

“Oh my gosh, it was—it was so sad. It was so heartbreaking. I was the bad guy every single day. Does that not feel good to anyone? Like that doesn’t feel good to me,” Collins replied, later saying she didn’t feel like she was there to help people.

“It was just a sad building all around,” she said.

UnitedHealthcare’s business practices have been in the news this month following the December 4 killing of the company’s CEO Brian Thompson. The shooter wrote “Deny, Defend, Depose” on the empty shell casings of the bullets that killed Thompson, in an apparent reference to Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Play Claims and What You Can Do About It, a 2010 book by Jay M. Feinman about the healthcare industry. A backpack linked to the shooting was filled with Monopoly money.

The suspect in the shooting, Luigi Mangione, has pled not guilty. He faces 11 charges, including weapons charges, murder and committing a terrorist act. A recent Associated Press/NORC poll showed that 69% of adults believe that health insurance companies’ policies to deny claims while making record profits was at least partially responsible for Thompson’s death.

UnitedHealthcare says Mangione did not have an account with the company, according to NBC News.

Image by Tony Webster via Wikimedia Commons

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News

Trump’s Mike Johnson Endorsement Treats Embattled Speaker Like Afterthought

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Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) may not be speaker after Friday’s vote—though he did get the nod from President-elect Donald Trump Monday morning. But even then, Trump spent most of his endorsement bragging about winning the election.

Johnson faces an uphill battle to retain the speakership on January 3’s scheduled vote as the new session of Congress begins. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) was the first Republican to say he would be voting against Johnson. Several other Republicans from the rightmost wing of the party have played coy about who they’ll vote for. On Monday morning, Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) criticized Johnson in a Fox and Friends appearance. She also neglected to say how she would be voting.

“If we don’t have a speaker with the courage, vision and the plan, and if Speaker Johnson wants to be speaker, then he needs to lay out the plan and commit to that plan, not like what he did last year,” she said, according to Mediaite.

READ MORE: House Could Be Heading For Another Speaker Battle As Dems Refuse to Help Mike Johnson

Posting to Truth Social, Trump gave Johnson his endorsement in a rambling message that treated the embattled speaker more like an afterthought. The vast majority of his 241-word statement was spent bragging about how Trump won the 2024 election and criticizing Democrats. Only 29 words—30 if you count “MAGA!!”—was spent on Johnson.

“We are the Party of COMMON SENSE, a primary reason that we WON, in a landslide, the magnificent and historic Presidential Election of 2024. ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, 312 ELECTORAL COLLEGE VOTES, AND THE POPULAR VOTE BY MILLIONS OF VOTERS (Despite large scale voter fraud taking place in numerous states, including California, where votes are ridiculously still being counted, or under review!), ALL WON WITH EASE, CALM, & PROFESSIONALISM,” Trump wrote in part, before condemning Democrats for “having wasted 2.5 Billion Dollars,” and accusing them of “illegally [buying] endorsements.”

“$11,000,000 to Beyoncé, who never even sang a song, $2,000,000 to Oprah for doing next to nothing, and even $500,000 to Reverend AL, a professional con man and instigator, who agreed to “interview” their “star spangled” candidates, Kamala and Joe,” Trump wrote.

Continuing to brag about how his campaign won despite spending “FAR LESS,” Trump eventually gets to the matter at hand.

“Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man. He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!” Trump wrote, the entirety of his comments on Johnson.

Though the Republicans maintained their control of the House, their majority is again razor-thin. If Johnson wants to remain speaker, he needs almost all of his party to vote for him. Johnson can only afford to lose two votes; assuming Massie is not swayed by Trump’s endorsement, that means if only one other Republican defects, he can’t win.

Johnson even reportedly asked Elon Musk if he was interested in becoming speaker, despite Musk not being elected to any position. Without a speaker, the House cannot function—and that includes being unable to certify the presidential election if no speaker is chosen by January 6.

Image via Shutterstock

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CRIME

Trump Loses E. Jean Carroll Appeal Two Days After Sharing Meme Saying She Should Be Jailed

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A three-judge panel has upheld the ruling that awarded E. Jean Carroll $5 million from President-elect Donald Trump. Two days prior, Trump shared a meme saying she should go to jail.

The ruling came from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Manhattan-based court upheld all of the original ruling. Trump’s lawyers had “not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings. Further, he has not carried his burden to show that any claimed error or combination of claimed errors affected his substantial rights as required to warrant a new trial,” the judges wrote.

Carroll said that Trump raped her at a Bergdorf Goodman store dressing room. Trump denied the claim, and accused Carroll of perpetrating a hoax to promote her book. He repeatedly said that not only did he not know her, she wasn’t his “type.”

READ MORE: E. Jean Carroll Talks About ‘Zero’ Trump in Court and Reveals How She Will Use Jury Award

The original ruling found that though the standard of “rape” was not reached, Trump was liable for sexual assault. The court awarded Carroll $2.02 million for sexual assault, plus an additional $2.98 million for defamation, according to Reuters.

In the appeal, Trump’s lawyers objected to allowing testimony from other women who said Trump sexually assaulted them. His lawyers also objected to allowing jurors to hear the infamous Access Hollywood tape that went public in 2016 where Trump bragged about being able to grab women by their genitalia. On the tape, Trump says, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

The appellate court ruled that this evidence was indeed legal for the jury to hear.

“This Court has long taken an ‘inclusionary’ approach… under which other act evidence is admissible unless it is introduced for the sole purpose of showing a defendant’s bad character,” the court wrote.

Two days before the ruling, Trump shared a meme on his Truth Social account, which suggested Carroll should go for jail for making false accusations.

e. jean carroll

The meme reshared by Trump on Saturday. (Screenshot/Truth Social)

The meme reads “Should a woman go to jail for falsely accusing a man of rape? Retruth if you want justice for Trump.”

This meme could prove problematic for Trump. Trump’s been hit by additional lawsuits from Carroll for defamation, when he continued to say she made up her assault story. This January, a court ruled that Trump had to pay her an additional $83.3 million for defamation; the appeal in that case is still pending.

The case was at the center of another scandal. This December, ABC News was criticized for deciding to settle with Trump for $16 million when he sued for defamation. That case hinged on a March 2024 report from George Stephanopoulos that said Trump had been found liable for rape.

Some legal experts criticized ABC News for settling, saying that it could have won the case. However, some reporting suggests that ABC News was worried about what could be uncovered during the discovery phase of the trial.

Image via Shutterstock

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