Since video surfaced of the Aug. 22 murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, the White House, along with congressional and state Republicans, has assailed Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice (TREC), which he established in 2020.

Republicans say TREC, created to “ensure racial equity in North Carolina’s criminal justice system,” is the reason Decarlos Brown Jr. was free to be on the train when Zarutska sat in the row in front of him on her way home from work.

Former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley, who’s running against Cooper for the open U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina in 2026, pinned the blame on TREC for policies like cashless bail.

“In 2020, my Democrat opponent, Roy Cooper, tasked a group of extreme leftists with advising him on implementing his executive order, which introduced weak-on-crime policies to North Carolina’s justice system regarding ‘pretrial release, fees, and fines,'” Whatley said in a post this week. “These policy changes empowered dangerous criminals, such as Decarlos Brown Jr., the murderer of Iryna Zarutska.”

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I lived there when he was Gov. Almost every policy was against the people or anything morally right. He was an asshole to the people instead of a leader