Convicted sex offender offered opening prayer at rally for GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina

A pastor kicked off a recent campaign stop for Michael Whatley, the Republican nominee for Senate, with a prayer that asked God to bestow “integrity and honesty” upon the event and to right wrongs “hammered down on the conservative movement.”

The prayer was hardly unusual by North Carolina political standards. What was surprising was the man who delivered it. Pastor Daimon L. King is a registered sex offender, twice sentenced to prison for convictions involving children, according to state and court records.

The episode occurred with two months to go in a marquee Senate race that could help decide which party controls the chamber after the November elections. It risks undermining one of Whatley’s central campaign arguments — that his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper, is soft on crime. And it could feed into an advertising blitz by Democrats that has targeted the Republican candidate’s association with another convicted sex offender, a former GOP official.

King did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Whatley's campaign declined to make him available for an interview. In a statement, campaign spokesman DJ Griffin said Whatley did not know King and the event “was NOT planned nor organized by the Whatley campaign nor did the campaign invite any of the guests.”

He emphasized that King had been “invited by the hosts,” which he identified as the Craven County Republican Party.

Officials with the county party could not be reached for comment.

Whatley served as chairman of the North Carolina GOP from 2019 until Trump elevated him in 2024 to lead the Republican National Committee, a post he stepped down from to pursue the Senate seat at the president's urging.

King’s prayer and Whatley’s association with the former GOP official Harvey L. West Jr., the other convicted sex offender, could prove particularly problematic as the Republican Senate candidate seeks to shore up support from hard-right conservatives, said Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University who is not related to the former governor.

Anger in Trump’s base over the government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case pressured the president to sign legislation to release the records.

The documents, which detailed the deceased sex offender’s interactions with prominent figures in politics and business, pushed suspicions about powerful people and institutions that had circulated for years on the political right into a much broader public debate.

“The far right has not coalesced behind (Whatley) and these kinds of revelations will make that problem even greater,” Cooper said.

King, 60, is the leader of New Beginnings Celebration church in New Bern, a town near the North Carolina coast where the rally was held on Aug. 28. The pastor has taken on an increasingly visible role in Republican politics in recent years. He presents himself as a pro-Trump Black conservative and has served as a precinct chairman for the Craven County GOP. He has praised Trump and decried “fake news” in sermons uploaded to YouTube, delivering what he calls the “pure, uncut word of God.”

The event at the Craven County GOP headquarters featured Whatley and Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former daytime TV personality who is Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

King can be seen in a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Whatley’s campaign following the event. While Whatley and Oz took turns railing against fraud in the medical system, King positioned himself conspicuously in the background, nodded along in agreement and flashed a double thumbs-up.

King took to his church’s Facebook group the next day to offer a glowing assessment of the event.

“The atmosphere was charged with prayer and patriotism through the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of THE United States of America!!!” King wrote, adding that he and his church “fully support and are behind” Whatley.

Some 30 years ago, King was a marching band assistant at a high school outside Raleigh when he was charged with statutory rape and indecent liberties with a 15-year-old student, The News & Observer reported at the time. King, then 31, was convicted in 1998 and served nearly five years in prison before being paroled, according to state department of corrections records.

In 2010, he pleaded guilty to having sex with an underage female relative and served close to three years in prison, state records show.

King is required under North Carolina law to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Since March, Whatley has been dogged over his ties to West, who served as a congressional district committee chair in the state GOP when Whatley was chairman.

West, a former small-town police officer, was convicted of five counts of indecent liberties with a child and served six years in prison, corrections records show.

In 2012, news outlets reported on his conviction, forcing West to step down as an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention.

At the time, West denied he had committed the offenses and said that he had pleaded guilty to avoid the risk of spending decades behind bars, The Associated Press reported. He is no longer required to register as a sex offender.

West’s conviction resurfaced in the campaign earlier this year after Republican activists publicly aired concerns about his continued role in the party. The state GOP has since banned convicted sex offenders from holding party office.

Democrats, however, continue to hammer Whatley over the issue, spending more than $2.3 million on ads featuring a photo of Whatley and West posing together.

In an interview, West said he has always been transparent with party leaders about his past and noted that the main job he held in the state GOP was an elected position. He acknowledged, however, that he had been appointed to other roles when Whatley was chairman.

“I’m not going to say Michael Whatley put me up there,” West said. “But I wasn’t taken off either.”

West said he has sought to atone for his past and expressed frustration that his conviction had become a campaign issue.

“I wanted to serve as I followed my own redemption path. We have a right to be part of the political process,” West said. “For 20 years, I have been upfront and open about who I am and what happened to me. Not everyone does that.”

West also said he was familiar with King’s convictions and warned others in the party about associating with the pastor when he was considered for a GOP position. "I just said, ‘Hey, y’all might want to take a look at this,’” said West.

Michael Whatley, North Carolina senatorial candidate, greets delegates as he takes the stage at the Republican convention in Dallas, Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)

FILE - North Carolina Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Michael Whatley addresses the crowd before Vice President JD Vance speaks, March 13, 2026, in Rocky Mount, N.C. (AP Photo/Chris Seward, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal court on Friday ruled that the Energy Department exceeded its authority when it forced a Michigan coal-fired power plant to stay open past its scheduled retirement date last year.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright had said the 64-year-old J.H. Campbell Generating Plant was needed to ensure reliable electricity in the region, and he used emergency powers to keep it operating. Environmental groups and three states — Michigan, Illinois and Minnesota — went to court to try to overturn orders keeping the plant online.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the states and the groups, saying there was no real emergency under the law.

The section of the Federal Power Act that allows emergency orders “is essentially a narrow, last-resort backstop," Appeals Court Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel. Use of emergency authority “is triggered only when there is a need for immediate, essentially last-resort action and the circumstances require action by DOE in particular, as opposed to action by the state or states responsible for resource adequacy," she added.

Reversing the Campbell plant's “long and carefully planned retirement" is "disruptive," Pillard wrote.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said she was relieved the appeals court “threw out DOE’s order that had zero basis in reality.”

Nessel, a Democrat, said her office “has been fighting this unlawful political stunt at every turn, and this ruling proves what we have been saying all along: this administration does not get to invent fake emergencies to bypass the rule of law against the best interests of Michigan residents.”

The Michigan case is one of several legal disputes that have emerged across the country as the Trump administration uses emergency powers to force a half-dozen coal-fired plants to remain open.

Administration officials were undeterred by Friday's court ruling and just hours later Wright announced another emergency order to keep online a coal plant in Centralia, Washington. That plant, operated by TransAlta, had been scheduled to shut down at the end of 2025.

The orders, which also apply to plants in Indiana, Colorado, Florida and Washington state, are raising ratepayer bills and adding air and water pollution that could have been avoided, critics say. An oil and gas plant in Pennsylvania was also ordered to keep its turbines running as a hedge against electricity shortages in the mid-Atlantic grid.

President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency in a January 2025 executive order, citing demand increases from artificial intelligence and data center growth.

An Energy Department spokesperson said the emergency orders — including at Campbell — “prevented blackouts and likely saved hundreds of lives during peak capacity events this past year,” especially severe winter storms in late January and early February.

At the peak of the storms, coal generation in affected regions increased by 25% compared to the previous year, spokeswoman Emily Matthews said. The Campbell plant provided over 650 megawatts — enough power for hundreds of thousands of homes — every day from Jan. 21 to Feb. 1, she said.

The Energy Department "will continue to protect and defend energy security for all Americans,” she said.

Keeping the Michigan plant open beyond its May 2025 retirement has cost about $259 million so far, according to new financial filings. Those losses will likely be paid by families and businesses in the Midwest, opponents of the order say.

Consumers Energy, which operates the Campbell plant, said it was reviewing the court ruling. In the meantime, the utility will keep the plant operating under terms of a recent DOE order that extends its directive through mid-November, spokesman Brian Wheeler said in a statement.

Ted Kelly, U.S. clean energy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the court ruling rejected the Trump administration’s nationwide effort to force “unreliable, aging coal plants that are bleeding money and polluting communities to stay online.”

The Energy Department's “unlawful actions attempted to make families and businesses in the Midwest wastefully pay hundreds of millions of dollars for a coal plant that should have been shut down over a year ago,” Kelly said Friday. The Campbell plant and other aging sites are “incredibly expensive, dangerous to our health and break down frequently,” he said.

Sanjay Narayan, a lawyer for the Sierra Club, called the ruling a victory for families across the Midwest who are “paying to keep this old, expensive and dirty power plant online.”

The Trump administration “has been pulling out all the stops to try to bolster dirty and expensive fossil fuels at public expense. This reckless agenda will not succeed,” Narayan said. "We will continue to fight back against the other illegal extensions across the country.”

Associated Press writer Ed White in Detroit contributed to this story.

FILE - An aerial image of Consumer Energy's J.H. Campbell Generating Complex is seen in Ottawa County, Mich., Sept. 21, 2024. (Joel Bissell/Kalamazoo Gazette via AP, File)

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright speaks after the signing of an oil agreement between the US and Venezuela at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Pedro Mattey)