There is a website called The North Carolinian. Across the top it says "Independent Journalism for North Carolina."
It is not independent journalism, and it is not really a news site. Popular Information reports that it is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC that exists to win Senate seats for the party.
It is not the first one. On August 6, 2026, Judd Legum's Popular Information exposed a whole network of sites like it, and we covered that exposé when it broke: at least six of them in states with competitive Senate races, run by One Nation — the dark money group that has handed the Senate Leadership Fund over $70 million this cycle. Four were built around Republicans we track. North Carolina was not among them.
On August 27, Legum reported what the North Carolina site is now being used for.
The article
On August 21, The North Carolinian published a piece with no byline: "Families Demand Accountability for Repeat Offenders as North Carolina Prison Releases Face New Scrutiny."
It is built around the killing of 22-year-old Logan Federico. It dwells on the record of the man accused of murdering her, Alexander Dickey — "at least 48 crimes across 14 separate occasions, including 31 felony charges," in the article's own words. Then it connects her death to a decision by former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper's administration to release thousands of inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cooper is the Democratic candidate for North Carolina's open U.S. Senate seat. The implication is that a Democrat's policy got a young woman killed.
Here is what the article leaves out.
Logan Federico was killed in South Carolina. Dickey is a South Carolina man. Every one of his prior crimes was committed in South Carolina. He had been incarcerated in South Carolina, and he was released from the Lexington County Detention Center — a South Carolina jail — by a South Carolina judge.
Roy Cooper was never governor of South Carolina. He had no authority over that jail, that judge, or that release. No North Carolina policy, and nothing Cooper did, had anything to do with it.
The article never mentions South Carolina at all.
Why they needed a fake newspaper
This is the part worth sitting with. A political committee can say almost anything in an ad. What it cannot do is make the claim look like it came from somewhere other than a political committee.
That's what The North Carolinian is for. An unbylined article on a site branded as independent local journalism reads like reporting. Popular Information's assessment is blunt: this is a smear published in a form no legitimate outlet would print, dressed up to look like it was.
And it isn't sitting there passively. The Senate Leadership Fund is paying to put the fake article in front of North Carolina residents through ads on Meta's platforms.
The television ad does the same trick
The online push runs alongside an SLF television ad, and the ad uses the same technique in a more precise way.
It shows an image of a news report about the murder from WCNC — a real television station, in Charlotte, North Carolina — carrying a "Charlotte, N.C." dateline. A viewer sees a North Carolina newsroom reporting a North Carolina story.
The ad obscures the part of the WCNC piece that says the crime took place in South Carolina.
That is not a framing choice or an unfortunate omission. Someone looked at a real news report, identified the sentence that would collapse the entire argument, and covered it up before putting it on television.
Where Michael Whatley comes into it
The Senate Leadership Fund is spending this money to elect Michael Whatley, Cooper's Republican opponent. And Logan Federico's father has appeared with Whatley on the campaign trail.
Whatley did not build the website, and there is no reporting that he directed any of this. But he is the sole beneficiary, and he is not a bystander to the story the ads tell — he has campaigned alongside the grieving parent whose daughter's death is being misattributed to his opponent.
He is also uniquely positioned to know how this works. Before running for Senate he was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Asked what he thinks of a super PAC supporting him running a counterfeit North Carolina newspaper to blame Cooper for a South Carolina crime, he could answer at any time.
It fits the pattern on his campaign, which we have documented before: calling the police on reporters who came to ask him questions, and a "truck ad" biography that his committees' own spending reports contradict.
What we know
The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC of Senate Republicans, secretly controls a website called The North Carolinian that presents itself as "Independent Journalism for North Carolina." On August 21, 2026, that site published an unbylined article blaming former Gov. Roy Cooper's pandemic-era prison releases for the murder of 22-year-old Logan Federico — a killing committed in South Carolina, by a South Carolina man released from a South Carolina jail by a South Carolina judge. The article never mentions South Carolina. SLF is paying to promote it to North Carolina voters on Meta, and its companion TV ad displays a real Charlotte station's report with the line identifying South Carolina obscured. SLF is spending that money to elect Michael Whatley.
Source
Judd Legum, "UPDATE: Senate GOP's fake news website falsely links Democrat to murder", Popular Information, August 27, 2026.
