In December 2015 — the same month future Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley got the call to run Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign in North Carolina — he received a different kind of summons: an arrest order in Rutherford County for failure to appear in court.
Whatley, now the Republican Party’s nominee for North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat, has staked his campaign on issues of law and order — casting himself as a champion for state troopers and police officers.
But legal records tell a different story.
According to court records in 14 different traffic cases reviewed by NC Newsline from North Carolina and Virginia, Whatley has repeatedly avoided facing the law, failing to appear in court in four North Carolina traffic cases and being found guilty in absentia in four traffic cases in Virginia.
Records matched Whatley’s full name, birth year, and places of residence. In each of the 14 cases, Whatley pleaded guilty or responsible or was found guilty in his absence, excluding a 1998 expired registration citation disposed of by a North Carolina court and a 2007 citation for operating an uninspected vehicle that was dismissed.
Spokesmen for the Whatley campaign did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls requesting comment.
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The 2015 order for Whatley’s arrest was the second bench warrant issued in the Rutherford County case, in which he was charged in June of that year with speeding 64 mph in a 45 mph zone. That offense was charged as a misdemeanor, resulting in bench warrants on bonds of $500 and $1,000 when he failed to appear for court.
He would not ultimately report to court until January 2016, following unsuccessful attempts to serve arrest orders in the previous September and December, Rutherford County court records show. He paid a $258 fine the following April, pleading down to responsibility for a faulty speedometer.
The Rutherford County charges came just over two weeks after Whatley pleaded to another lesser charge in a Caldwell County court in a separate speeding case, where he had been charged with driving 65 mph in a 50 mph zone.
Nearly a decade later, serving as general counsel for the national Republican Party, Whatley again failed to appear in court in June and July of 2023 — this time in Martin County, charged with speeding 68 mph on a stretch of U.S. 64 near Jamesville, where the speed limit is 55 mph.
According to the North Carolina state trooper who cited Whatley, the records show, Whatley said he did not know his speed and believed the limit to be 65 mph. The trooper noted down his vehicle as a GMC Sierra — the same truck Whatley recently posted on X, noting its odometer had hit 400,000 miles owing to his multiple drives through all of North Carolina’s 100 counties as a party official.
Whatley was cited for traffic offenses in seven of North Carolina’s 100 counties between 1989 and 2023, as well as four counties in Virginia.
Since 2015, Whatley has paid $912 in traffic fines.
It has been an amazing experience to drive to all 100 counties multiple times over the years.
Today, me and my truck hit a big milestone – 400,000 miles – as we made our way from the mountains to the coast to meet with the great people who call the Old North State home. pic.twitter.com/FUjyX5sSRo
— Michael Whatley (@WhatleyNC) April 18, 2026
A longtime attorney, Whatley graduated from the University of Notre Dame School of Law in 1997 before serving as a federal law clerk in Charlotte. He was a member of George W. Bush’s legal team in Florida during the 2000 election recount and served as the RNC’s general counsel from March 2023 to April 2024 after working for more than a decade as a lobbyist.
Colby Berry, a Raleigh-based defense attorney, told NC Newsline that it is illegal for a defendant to fail to appear in court for a traffic case, though doing so will usually result in license revocation after a certain period of time rather than a bench warrant for arrest. “When you get a citation from a police officer, you’re promising to appear.”
“It could be that magistrate’s policy to issue warrants for arrest on the lower-level misdemeanors, like traffic stuff, there could be some discretion. It could be up to whether they have a history of missing court,” Berry said.
Berry said defendants have the option of hiring a traffic lawyer to appear for them in the event that they are unable to appear themselves. The record for the 2015 case shows that Whatley did not retain an attorney until January 2016, after both bench warrants were issued, at which time the court recalled the order for arrest.
Former Gov. Roy Cooper told a crowd of a couple hundred supporters at an April 9, 2026 rally in Durham that he will stand up to insurance companies and oppose the Trump administration’s tariffs if elected to the U.S. Senate. (Photo: Brandon Kingdollar/NC Newsline)Whatley is vying to succeed U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who dropped his reelection bid following high-profile feuds with Trump. The former RNC chairman won the nomination after receiving Trump’s coveted endorsement, and his race is crucial for Republicans to hold the U.S. Senate, which Democrats increasingly believe they can flip due to the president’s flagging approval ratings and the country’s economic woes.
Throughout the 2026 U.S. Senate campaign, Whatley has sought to strike a contrast on crime with his Democratic opponent, former Gov. Roy Cooper, who leads him in most polls by a healthy margin.
Whatley has accused Cooper of making North Carolinians less safe by settling with civil rights groups to release 3,500 prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic — a claim that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly has now launched a committee to investigate.
“We need to keep our kids and our communities safe,” Whatley told a crowd of hundreds at a Trump rally in Rocky Mount last December. “We don’t need to reimagine law enforcement. We need to back the blue and we need to enforce the law.”
His campaign’s rapid response account on X, Whatley War Room, makes weekly “Mugshot Monday” posts, circulating images of criminal defendants and attributing their conduct to the “soft-on-crime legacy Roy Cooper left behind in North Carolina.”
Michael Whatley, the North Carolina Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, accepted the endorsement of the North Carolina Troopers Association in Charlotte on March 4, 2026. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Michaels/Carolina Public Press)In recent months, however, Whatley has drawn scrutiny from activists within his own party over law and order issues, including his decision to appoint convicted sex offender Harvey West to the body that drafts the state party’s rules, and his participation in an annual judicial fundraiser hosted by West. Whatley declined to address the controversy over West when asked directly earlier this month.
In Whatley’s first campaign event of the general election last month at the lodge of the Charlotte Fraternal Order of Police, he vowed to “put dangerous criminals behind bars.” Richard Maness, a retired state trooper, presented him with the endorsement of the North Carolina Troopers Association.
“North Carolina troopers want a United States senator who will have our backs, and who will help us protect our communities each and every day, not just during an election season,” Maness said. “Our members live the impact of public safety decisions each and every day.”
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