Vanessa Swales

But it was less clear which had bothered his employers more — the negative views of Trump that he voiced on the air, or the fact that he had also gone on competing stations’ programs to express them.

Like many talk-show hosts, Silverman, a lawyer and former chief deputy district attorney, likes to debate and push boundaries. His constant on-air arguments with a co-host, Dan Caplis, helped make the duo’s former show on another Denver station one of the most popular in the city.

But Silverman said in an interview Sunday that he sees himself as an independent analyst, not a partisan conservative — and that may have made him increasingly unwelcome at KNUS. Silverman said the station’s owner, the Salem Media Group, which focuses on conservative and Christian programming, is “100% behind Donald Trump.”

Neither Salem Media nor the operations manager at KNUS, Kelly Michaels, responded to requests Sunday for comment.

Silverman said he supported Trump in 2016, taking a chance that he would shake things up for the better in Washington. But after seeing Trump’s performance in office, he said, he “stepped back off the Trump train” and rebranded his show as the “Island of Independence.” As the investigations of Trump and his associates accelerated toward an impeachment inquiry, he said, he tried to concentrate on discussing the facts objectively, “and not go down various rabbit holes or engage in any what-about-isms.”

The station management never told him what to say on the air, Silverman said. But he started to notice that the other hosts on the station gradually stopped inviting him to appear on their shows. He said he thought it was because he was the “only non-Trumpster.”

“I think it makes great radio when people can disagree,” he said. “But something about Trump and impeachment — my colleagues don’t want to discuss it, and they don’t want any disagreements.”

He said he became frustrated at feeling frozen out on KNUS. “I expressed myself on Twitter, but I was hoping to be able to express myself on my own radio station, but that wasn’t available,” Silverman said. “So, other media outlets asked me on.”

He said that angered the station’s managers, who warned him last week that if he continued to speak on competing shows, his job would be jeopardy.

“I canceled going on, and then I met with them on Thursday,” Silverman said. “I explained that under my contract, I have a right to go on other media. And they said, well, we don’t want you to do it.”

In addition to dropping Silverman from the air, KNUS has also apparently removed all of his content from its website, including more than five years’ worth of podcasts.

Elizabeth Skewes, a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder who teaches media law and ethics, said that while “to some degree, Craig Silverman was doing what he was hired to do, express his opinion,” the station was well within its rights to dismiss him if it no longer wanted to put those opinions on the air. The First Amendment protects free speech only from government censorship, she said, not from private business decisions.

Even so, she said, she saw it as part of a problematic trend.

“We’ve become less tolerant of alternative viewpoints as media has become more polarized,” Skewes said. “The more narrow it gets, the worse off we are as a democracy.”

Others working in broadcasting have seen their careers abruptly deflected over whether they were supportive of Trump. When Jerry Bader, a conservative radio host in Green Bay, Wisconsin, was fired in 2018 after 18 years at the station, he said it was over his criticism of the president. In October, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who had frequently aired reports critical of Trump, abruptly resigned after publicly clashing with a staunchly pro-Trump host on the network, Tucker Carlson.

And James Bunner, a reporter for KTTC-TV, an NBC affiliate in Rochester, Minnesota, was fired in October for wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat while covering a Trump rally.

This article originally appeared in

Conservative Talk Host Is Fired Midshow After Criticizing Trump

Craig Silverman had clearly worn out his welcome on KNUS, a conservative talk-radio station in Denver. Midway through his three-hour show Saturday, after a segment criticizing President Donald Trump, the station suddenly cut away to a news report, and the station’s operations manager walked into the studio and told Silverman, “You’re done.”

The threat evaporated on Thursday, though, when the recanvass yielded no change and Bevin threw in the towel. The state was spared a possible challenge in the Legislature that was sure to inflame partisan tensions.

With a winning margin of 0.36%, the race was very close — but the country has seen even closer races for governor. Some have ended only after weeks of rancor, while in others, the loser bowed out gracefully, even when there were ample grounds for fighting on.

Candidates have to weigh whether the short-term battle is worth the long-term consequences, said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in constitutional and election law: “You see that lesson sometimes in U.S. history, of saying, ‘Do we have to fight for the last ballot in this election to get a fair count this time or should we just go home and regroup and try again a few years later?’ There’s been an ambivalence in the American psyche about that.”

Here are some of the real squeakers in gubernatorial history, and how they turned out.

NEW YORK, 1792

The Founders Were ‘Flying Blind’

The candidates: Chief Justice John Jay, a Federalist, challenging Gov. George Clinton, a Democratic-Republican.

How close was it?: 108 votes (0.64%).

What happened?: Jay received more total votes on Election Day. But a dispute arose over a technicality: whether the people who had delivered the ballot boxes from three upstate counties to the secretary of state had been properly deputized. After heated debate and an attempt at arbitration by the state’s two U.S. senators, the committee of lawmakers supervising the election voted narrowly to reject the three counties’ ballots, most of which were for Jay.

Who won in the end?: Excluding those ballots put Clinton ahead by 108 votes, and he was declared reelected.

Many Federalists were enraged at the partisan manipulation of the outcome. But Alexander Hamilton, a fellow Federalist, advised Jay to take the high road, concede the race gracefully and then run again in 1795 with his reputation as a statesman intact. He did, and won easily.

“The concept of governors’ elections was new,” Foley said, adding that the politicians involved “were kind of flying blind.” “They didn’t really understand their own new government,” he said, “and they had to kind of invent things as they went along.”

MASSACHUSETTS, 1839

Decided By a Single Ballot

The candidates: Marcus Morton, a Democrat, and others challenging Gov. Edward Everett, a Whig.

How close was it?: One vote.

What happened?: As returns were tallied, the lead changed hands several times until Morton pulled ahead of Everett by about 300 votes. But under the state constitution, having the most votes was not enough; to be elected, a candidate needed an outright majority. And enough votes had been cast for minor candidates to cast doubt on whether Morton had cleared the threshold.

Who won in the end?: It fell to the state Legislature to decide the issue. Though it was under Whig control, the Legislature decided that Morton, the Democrat, had received 51,034 votes — exactly one more than half the total.

A number of ballots could have been challenged on technical grounds, but Everett resisted pressure from fellow Whigs to contest the tally, and Morton became governor.

“There’s this proverbial statement, ‘Everyone should vote because maybe your vote actually will count,’” Foley said. Noting that the secretary of state, the official in charge of the election, had failed to cast his own ballot in time, Foley said: “One vote really made the difference. I think it’s an important story just for that.”

KENTUCKY, 1899

Partisan Tensions Boil Over in Violence

The candidates: William Goebel, a Democratic state senator, and William S. Taylor, the Republican state attorney general.

How close was it?: 2,383 votes (0.6%).

What happened?: The vote count certified by the state Board of Elections showed Taylor as the victor, and he was inaugurated. But there were widespread claims of voting irregularities, and Goebel challenged the result in the Democratic-controlled state Legislature, which set up a committee to investigate.

Partisan tensions ran high as angry Republicans from the countryside, many of them armed, poured into Frankfort, the state capital, hoping to keep the Democrats from overturning the result.

Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, said the 1880s and 1890s were a time of bitter divisions and winner-take-all politics with many similarities to today. “The parties really moved further apart from each other,” he said. “The parties were very organized internally and able to maintain discipline.”

Who won in the end?: Goebel, but not for long.

The committee invalidated enough Taylor votes to put Goebel in the lead, and the Legislature declared him the victor. But while the committee was deliberating, he was shot on the street and critically wounded. He took the oath of office in his sick bed, and died of his wounds three days later.

Taylor refused to cede the office and fought a lengthy legal battle with Goebel’s running mate, J.C.W. Beckham, over who was the rightful governor. It ended in 1900 when the Supreme Court let stand a state court decision in favor of Beckham, saying it would not intervene because no federal questions were at issue.

“That is a defining low moment in American history in terms of the ugliness of one dispute,” Foley said, adding that the Supreme Court decision in Taylor v. Beckham came to the fore a century later when the court ruled the opposite way in Bush v. Gore.

MINNESOTA, 1962

A Victory for Even-Handedness

The candidates: Lt. Gov. Karl Rolvaag of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, challenging the Republican incumbent, Gov. Elmer L. Andersen. (At that time, the two offices were elected separately.)

How close was it?: 91 votes (0.007%).

What happened?: The initial count on election night showed Andersen ahead by 142 votes out of 1.25 million cast. There was no law requiring recounts in close races, so Rolvaag went to court and won a ruling ordering a statewide recount of every ballot, which had to be conducted by hand.

A special tribunal was set up to rule on any disputed ballots and certify the final count, and the two sides agreed on its members: one respected judge from each party and one who was seen by both sides as neutral. Though it was allowed to make decisions by a 2-1 vote, in the end, the tribunal’s conclusions were unanimous.

Who won in the end?: The recount took months, but when it was complete, the tribunal determined that it was Rolvaag who had won, by 91 votes. Andersen accepted the result without complaint.

Foley said that Minnesota managed to do in 1962 what New York did not in 1792: institute a process that both sides agreed would be fair. “So that was an example of kind of inventing the missing ingredient,” he said.

WASHINGTON STATE, 2004

Leaving No Stone Unturned

The candidates: Dino Rossi, a Republican state senator, and Christine Gregoire, the Democratic state attorney general.

How close was it?: 129 votes (0.005%).

What happened?: A high proportion of voters cast absentee ballots, and it took two weeks for officials to count them and announce an initial tally, showing Rossi ahead by less than 0.5%, the state’s threshold for a mandatory machine recount. That recount narrowed Rossi’s lead to 42 votes. Democrats then requested, and agreed to pay for, a manual recount, which turned up hundreds of absentee ballots that had been left uncounted.

Tensions rose and street protests were mounted as the two sides wrestled in court. After the manual recount put Gregoire in the lead, Rossi said the whole election had been a mess and demanded a revote. “I think it was ultimately an accurate result, but the process was not an ideal process,” Foley said. “It left some heartburn for sure.”

Who won in the end?: The final tally showed Gregoire had won by 129 votes, and she was sworn in as governor in January 2005. Rossi did not formally concede until June, after a state judge rejected the Republicans’ demand for a rerun of the election for lack of evidence of deliberate tampering.

“It is now becoming a feature in these close races where the loser will not give up easily and will use every tool at their disposal, legally and otherwise,” Zelizer said. “It doesn’t necessarily stop with the ballot.”

The Kentucky Governor's Race Was Close. Some Have Been Much Closer.

For a while, Kentucky seemed headed for a lengthy partisan battle over its election for governor. Matt Bevin, the Republican incumbent, had finished about 5,000 votes behind his Democratic challenger, Attorney General Andy Beshear, and refused to concede; he began talking about voting irregularities, and demanded a recanvass of the county tallies.

“We are here at the Emmett Till monument that represents the civil rights movement for blacks,” announced Michael Hill, the leader of the group. “What we want to know is, where are all of the white — ”

A security alarm sounds. Hill and the rest of the group scatter and flee the scene. It was later revealed that he and his associates, all white, were there to film a propaganda video to promote the organization’s racist views.

The memorial they surrounded marks where Emmett’s swollen and disfigured body was found washed up by the Tallahatchie River after Emmett, a 14-year-old black boy, was abducted, tortured and lynched by two white men in 1955. The men were acquitted by an all-white jury. Last year, the cold case was reopened by the Justice Department.

The surveillance video, released by the Sumner Courthouse and Emmett Till Interpretive Center on Saturday and earlier reported by The Jackson Free Press, was the latest in a decadelong string of incidents involving the memorial sign.

Since it was first erected in 2008, the sign in Glendora, Mississippi, has been stolen and twice vandalized with bullet holes. This year, an Instagram post surfaced of three University of Mississippi students brandishing guns in front of the vandalized memorial.

A few weeks ago, a new memorial was put up for a fourth time, now bulletproof and with a surveillance system.

Emmett’s cousin Airickca Gordon-Taylor, 50, said she “felt a sense of pride” after seeing the group run away in the video. “I felt vindicated,” she said. A long-standing activist and the executive director of the Mamie Till Mobley Memorial Foundation, Gordon-Taylor has witnessed many hate crimes in the area. This is the first time she has seen the memorial used in a propaganda video for white supremacists, but experts say these tactics are not unique.

“White supremacists or people who are ignorant in terms of American history or are just bigoted have always disrespected places that are sacred to the civil rights movement,” said Jeffery Robinson, the director of the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality.

“I don’t think it is very unique,” Robinson added, referring to the League of the South’s use of the memorial in propaganda. “I think it is an extension of what they have already done.”

The League of the South has been vocal about its plans to engage in what the group calls “street activism.” This includes posing or demonstrating near sites related to the civil rights movement, such as the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama and Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas.

On the organization’s website Sunday, Hill wrote, “as usual, we got in and out quickly and avoided any trouble from the locals, including law enforcement,” adding, “we broke no laws by simply having our pictures taken at the marker.”

According to Howard Graves, senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Hill is dealing with “a dwindling pool of recruits,” and videos like the one he attempted to film at the Emmett Till memorial are part of the League of the South’s larger effort to reach new supporters.

“This is how they are trying to inflame the issue,” Graves said.

Patrick Weems, a founder of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said he had not been contacted by the Justice Department or the FBI regarding the vandalism.

“I don’t know what a hate crime is anymore,” he said.

“When we saw three university students standing in front of the marker with guns, we thought obviously this is a hate crime. They were intentionally trying to show a message to our community that Jim Crow days are not gone,” Weems said. “And yet nothing happened to those students, and so I think in some ways that empowered this next group to do what they did.”

Although the sheriff has increased surveillance of the memorial, its location — a remote area miles away from the nearest town — makes it difficult for law enforcement to monitor, Weems added.

The Emmett Till Interpretive Center raised more than $10,000 in donations after the center released the surveillance footage, Weems said Monday. He said he planned to put some of the money toward creating a permanent memorial site for Emmett.

“There are a lot of racially motivated crimes today and they’re always reflected on Emmett,” said Gordon-Taylor, Emmett’s cousin.

And yet, she said she had not been deterred by what happened over the weekend.

“Every time you knock the sign down, we’re going to re-erect it,” she said. “Every time it disappears, we’re going to remind you that you cannot get rid of us.”

White Supremacists Flee From Emmett Till Memorial While Filming Video

In the security camera footage, eight members of the League of the South, a white supremacist group based in Alabama, gathered around the Emmett Till memorial, the Mississippi flag and the southern nationalist flag waving in the wind.

“We saw that we were changing time zones fairly quickly,” Bowman said. “The twilight added a little bit to the mystery.”

Without knowing it, they had entered the Daylight Saving Doughnut.

It’s that time again — daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. Sunday, when clocks are turned back one hour. And while most people in the United States get to enjoy an extra hour of sleep, confident their phones will attend to the task of winding back the clock, two states — Arizona and Hawaii — will not “fall back” because they did not “spring forward.”

But what does that have to do with doughnuts?

OK, not all of Arizona holds out on daylight saving. In the northeastern quarter of the state, the Navajo Nation observes the time change in the spring.

But the Hopi Nation, which is encircled by Navajo territory, does not, making it the figurative “doughnut hole.”

The Navajo Nation is semiautonomous, with the power to set its own time system. Since the Navajo reservation extends into neighboring states that recognize daylight saving time — Utah and New Mexico — the nation decided to follow suit to keep the same time throughout its land.

“That means every summer, you have the Hopi Reservation with standard time, surrounded by the Navajo Reservation with daylight time, surrounded by the state of Arizona in standard time,” said David Prerau, a time policy expert and the author of “Seize the Daylight.”

“It is a very interesting, and confusing situation, and they’ve had that for years.”

The time change on Sunday brings everyone to standard time.

Who decided the rules for daylight saving time to begin with?

To understand how we got to where we are, we have to turn back time to the years after World War II, when there was no uniform national system.

At one point, there were 23 different pairs of daylight saving start and end dates in the state of Iowa. There was also a bus route that ran between Moundsville, West Virginia, and Steubenville, Ohio, that saw passengers changing time zones seven times in only a 35-mile stretch.

“Anybody could do what they wanted,” Prerau said. “You had a lot of unusual circumstances.”

But in 1966 Congress established the Uniform Time Act, which standardized daylight saving time across the country. Any state could exempt itself, and Arizona opted out of the law in 1967.

Why did Arizona get rid of it?

If you ask an Arizonan, they’ll probably tell you it’s all about energy conservation.

“It’s not unique to Arizona culturally, it’s more geographic,” said Calvin Schermerhorn, a professor of history at Arizona State University.

Arizona’s most populated areas, around Tucson and Phoenix, are very, very hot in the summer, and an extra hour of daylight to stay outdoors was not an incentive. Rather, the best time to go outside is often after the sun goes down.

“Instead of saving fuel, daylight saving time saw more fuel being spent on air conditioning, because of the extra hour of daylight” at the end of the day, Schermerhorn said.

But even now, there are those who would rather see Arizona follow daylight saving time. Many issues arise while traveling to, from or through the state. Businesses have complained of difficulties coordinating with their national or global branches. Communication is a problem, with many missed calls.

“It puts Arizona out of sync with everybody else,” Prerau said.

Are any other states going to make the change?

Hawaii’s choice against observing daylight saving time causes less disruption than Arizona’s given that it is isolated from other states and near the Equator, where the sunrises and sunsets don’t vary much.

Several overseas territories, including American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also do not observe daylight saving time.

And many other states are pushing to drop daylight saving time all together. Over the past few years states including Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Alaska, Texas, Utah and Washington have pushed back against daylight saving time.

But others have fought to permanently stay in daylight saving time. Proposals have been filed in Florida, Idaho, Oregon and New Mexico.

“We’re marching away from that uniformity, which could wreak havoc on all the systems that rely on synchronized time,” Schermerhorn said.

There is support for getting rid of the time changes. Seven in 10 Americans would rather not have to switch their clocks twice a year, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released this past week.

What is less clear is whether they want to stay on standard time year round, or daylight time. Four in 10 Americans would like to stay on standard time, the poll found, while about three in 10 prefer full-time daylight time.

Even if everyone was on the same page with daylight saving, there would still be temporal fissures across the nation, with 14 states split by two different time zones. There are even some instances of towns which recognize time zones unofficially, such as Kenton, Oklahoma, in the western edge of the Panhandle. Officially, it’s on Central Time, but the town informally follows Mountain Time to be in sync with New Mexico, which is only 3 miles away.

Have an Extra Hour? Try Passing Through the 'Daylight Saving Doughnut'

Joshua and Hannah Bowman were driving through northeast Arizona on a cross-country road trip a few years ago, after deciding to move to California from Massachusetts. They had left Four Corners, safely taking U.S. Route 160 as evening rolled in, when something strange started happening on their phones.

It’s not hard to hear why they love it, either: Other than emergency and construction vehicles, there are no cars or trucks on the island to disturb the quiet. They’ve been banned for more than a century.

Except, that is, for Saturday afternoon, when Vice President Mike Pence paid a motorized visit that has some Mackinac lovers up in arms.

The island, all of which is listed as a national historic site, was hurtled into the 21st century when Pence arrived at the island’s airport by helicopter and then made his way down Cadotte Avenue, one of the island’s main roads, in a motorcade of eight SUVs, flanked by state police on bicycles. He was on his way to a Republican Party conference at the Grand Hotel, less than a mile from the airport as the crow flies. The eight SUVs had been brought to the island by ferry for the purpose.

Some residents and regular visitors and a few Democratic state politicians were aghast. Mark Brewer, the former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, called the motorcade “ridiculous,” “unnecessary” and “disrespectful.” Lobbyist and former journalist Ron Fournier called it “sacrilege.”

Pence, the first sitting vice president to visit Mackinac Island, is apparently also the first government official to break with the island’s carless tradition. Previous VIPs have gotten around the 3.8-square-mile island by horse-drawn carriage, including former presidents and the only sitting president to visit, Gerald Ford, in 1975 — although his Secret Service detail did have a backup vehicle on the island in case of emergency.

A spokeswoman for Pence did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

Mackinac (pronounced Mack-ee-naw) is one of a handful of places across the United States that do not allow automobiles, including Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay and Supai in the Havasupai Nation, in Arizona.

It is a tradition that is central to the allure of the island. And it has drawn numerous accolades from travel publications.

At the dawn of the automobile era, many small communities were concerned that noisy, smelly newfangled automobiles would scare the horses that most people depended upon, and the village of Mackinac was no exception. The village council resolved on July 6, 1898, that “the running of horseless carriages be prohibited within the limits of the village.” One resident was quoted as referring to cars as “mechanical monsters.”

Most of the rest of the island is state parkland, and the Mackinac Island State Park Commission followed suit in 1901, imposing a ban after Earl C. Anthony, a “summer cottager” who brought a car to the island, scared and injured some horses and several carriages were damaged.

Those bans soon fell away in mainland communities, but on Mackinac Island they have stuck to this day, helping to preserve it as a picturesque oasis of Victorian “cottages,” locally owned shops and natural beauty with a year-round population of about 470. The former fur trading outpost has become a hugely popular vacation spot for Midwestern families during the summer months, attracting nearly 1 million visitors a year.

Besides being car-free, the island is also known for its fudge. It has 15 fudge stores, and the tourists who frequent them are called “fudgies.”

The island can be reached only by air, by ferry or by boat, and people get around on foot, on bikes or by horse. There are more than 600 horses on the island during the summer season, and 1,400 bikes available to rent, according to the Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau. Electric bikes are permitted with proof of disability. The island’s golf course has motorized carts, but they must remain on the golf course property at all times.

Despite the uproar in some quarters over Pence’s visit, some Michigan natives said they understood why security concerns might have necessitated a break with tradition.

“The idea of cars on Mackinac Island makes me wince,” Alicia Rancilio, a journalist from the state, wrote on Twitter. “But I do recognize security issues like this may require them.”

Shepler’s Mackinac Island Ferry, the company that delivered the eight SUVs to the island, said it was proud to have done so.

“It was our honor to transport the VP’s emergency vehicles to Mackinac Island this weekend,” Shepler’s posted on its Facebook page. “Regardless of your political views, your voting history, or your choice in fudge flavor, we hope you’ll understand the logistical intricacies involved in securing our leaders while visiting. We were happy to be selected for this important transport.”

A Motorcade on Mackinac Island? Pence's Visit Breaks a Long Tradition

It’s not hard to see why Mackinac Island, Michigan, is called the jewel of the Great Lakes. Vacationers love it for the natural beauty and the quaint atmosphere, preserved from a simpler time.

But, according to prosecutors, not only did the sheriff decline to haul the plotter in, he also encouraged him to carry out the killing and gave him advice on how to foil a murder investigation.

“You ain’t got the weapon, you ain’t got nothing to go on,” Sheriff Brindell Wilkins said during a recorded telephone call, according to an indictment released Monday in which he was charged with two felony counts of obstruction of justice. “The only way we find out these murder things is people talk. You can’t tell nobody nothin’, not a thing.”

According to court records, the deputy, Joshua Freeman, was in possession of an audio recording in which the sheriff made “racially offensive” remarks in 2014, which he planned to release to the authorities in nearby Raleigh. The indictment did not specify exactly what was said.

The threat of its release was motive enough for Wilkins to engage the unnamed man to carry out the murder that same year, prosecutors concluded after a 10-month investigation by the FBI and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

The sheriff was accused of saying of Freeman, who according to his LinkedIn profile worked as a K-9 narcotics interdiction officer for the county from 2011 to 2014, that “the only way you gonna stop him is kill him.” Ultimately, there was no attempt to take Freeman’s life.

The obstruction of justice charges against Wilkins accuse him of withholding “knowledge of a credible threat made by an individual” and not performing his duties as sheriff to protect the would-be victim and for counseling the unnamed person on how to commit the murder without being identified.

Wilkins, 59, has served as sheriff for the 59,000 residents of Granville County in northern North Carolina since 2009, and was most recently reelected in 2018.

Attempts to reach him for comment Tuesday were not successful.

The sheriff was released on a $20,000 bond Monday, forcing the Board of County Commissioners to call an emergency meeting Tuesday morning. They concluded that their hands were tied and Wilkins could continue to serve until he resigns or is convicted.

“The Board of Commissioners has no supervisory authority over the sheriff,” said James C. Wrenn Jr., a lawyer for the board.

But he did make known the commissioners displeasure in having a sheriff who himself is accused of serious crimes. “Let me be clear in saying that the commissioners and I are united on the fact that Granville County must have a chief law enforcement officer who upholds the law without animus or bias, who does not use his office for personal gain, and who does not obstruct justice,” he said.

Sheriff Plotted Murder of Deputy, Prosecutors Say

On one end of the phone, prosecutors say, was a man discussing plans to kill a sheriff’s deputy in Granville County, North Carolina. On the other end was the sheriff.

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