Tim Moore Corruption & Ethics North Carolina

Tim Moore Bought a Dead Chicken Plant for $85,000. His Own Staffer Contacted the Environmental Regulators. He Sold It for $550,000.

As North Carolina's House Speaker, Tim Moore co-owned a Siler City property with leaking-tank problems. A watchdog group says his office leaned on the state environmental agency until the problem went away — right before the sale closed.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 09, 2026

Tim Moore Bought a Dead Chicken Plant for $85,000. His Own Staffer Contacted the Environmental Regulators. He Sold It for $550,000.

In 2013, a company called Southeast Land Holdings LLC bought a shuttered chicken processing plant in Siler City, North Carolina, for $85,000. The vice president and part owner of that company was Tim Moore — then chairman of the state House Rules Committee, and two years later Speaker, the most powerful legislator in the state.

The property had a problem. Underground storage tanks, the kind that have to be dealt with under state environmental rules before anybody sensible buys the place. That's the sort of thing that kills a sale.

In September 2016, Southeast sold the property to Mountaire Farms, now the fourth-largest chicken company in the United States, for $550,000 — a profit of about $465,000 on a piece of land they'd held for three years.

In between those two dates, according to complaints filed with the North Carolina State Ethics Commission by the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability, Moore's public office kept showing up in the state's environmental files.

What the Emails Showed

The first ethics complaint, filed on March 5, 2018, alleged that Moore repeatedly contacted the Department of Environmental Quality seeking delays in enforcing the rules on his property. As the complaint put it: "In October 2014, DEQ granted Speaker Moore a 30-day extension, but told him that securing a buyer would not satisfy the regulations."

In April 2015, DEQ again told him to close the tanks. When he asked for another extension in May, the inspector called it "unlikely" — and DEQ approved it anyway. The complaint noted that DEQ "either could or would not produce" the "points" an official said the agency had considered in granting it.

Then more emails surfaced. In late 2018, Campaign for Accountability obtained correspondence showing that Mitch Gillespie — a senior policy adviser on environmental matters inside Speaker Moore's own office — had asked state environmental officials for a status report on removing the two underground tanks at the Siler City site. Moore and his partners were about two months from striking the Mountaire deal.

Within hours of Gillespie's request, DEQ officials wrote in emails that Southeast would be eligible for a state fund that helps pay for underground tank cleanup.

Hours.

Campaign for Accountability filed a second ethics complaint in January 2019 based on that correspondence. WUNC reported at the time that Moore had publicly denied any knowledge of the emails and pointed to documentation showing an earlier state ethics inquiry into the property had already closed.

North Carolina law prohibits legislators from using their "public position in an official action" for personal financial benefit. The complaints were dismissed. Nothing happened to Tim Moore.

The Buyer Was Getting Public Money Too

The other half of this deal is who was on the receiving end.

Mountaire Farms didn't just show up with a checkbook. Siler City and Chatham County officials agreed to give the company more than $2 million in incentives to open the plant, and the state added $1.5 million for wastewater improvements.

One of the state agencies that awarded the company a grant was the Rural Infrastructure Authority. As Speaker of the House, Moore appointed one-third of its board.

So: a company negotiating for public subsidies from a body the Speaker helps staff bought the Speaker's property, at more than six times what he paid for it, weeks after the Speaker's own environmental policy adviser got the state to move on the tanks.

Moore has never had to explain that sequence to a jury, a judge, or an ethics panel that ruled against him. He has simply outlasted the questions.

The Rest of the Record

The chicken plant is not an outlier. Moore carried the same habits to Washington.

In June 2025, Fortune reported that he failed to properly disclose stock purchases worth hundreds of thousands of dollars made around Trump's April 2025 "Liberation Day" tariff announcement — a potential violation of the STOCK Act, the federal law requiring members of Congress to report their trades within 45 days. He is one of 45 Republicans on this site who broke that law.

Every one of these has an explanation. None of them has a consequence.

Why This Matters in the 14th District

Nearly 680,000 North Carolinians have gained coverage through Medicaid expansion — coverage Moore's vote put at risk. The state lost 7,200 manufacturing jobs in 2025 while he backed Trump's tariffs — tariffs whose net impact on manufacturing jobs, the conservative John Locke Foundation's research chief said, "will be negative." Daimler Truck announced 573 temporary layoffs, most of them at its Mount Holly plant. Constituents have brought a black casket to his Gastonia office and held two town halls he didn't attend.

Meanwhile his own portfolio keeps finding its way into the right stock at the right moment, and his own property kept finding its way to the front of the state regulatory queue.

There is a version of public service where you take the job and put your interests aside. Tim Moore has spent more than two decades demonstrating the other version.

We deserve better.