Raleigh, North Carolina: Several top staffers in Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s campaign for governor have quit their posts, marking more fallout from a CNN report outlining evidence that he made disturbing posts on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago.

Those posts included Robinson referring to himself as a “black NAZI”, among other items.

The campaign said in a news release on Sunday that senior adviser Conrad Pogorzelski III, campaign manager Chris Rodriguez, the campaign’s finance director and a deputy campaign manager “have stepped down from their roles with the campaign”.

“I appreciate the efforts of these team members who have made the difficult choice to step away from the campaign, and I wish them well in their future endeavours,” Robinson said in the release.

Pogorzelski, who helped Robinson get elected lieutenant governor in 2020 in his first bid for public office and later became his chief of staff, said separately on Sunday that additional staffers also left the campaign, including the deputy finance director, two political directors and the director of operations.

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Pogorzelski, in a text, said that he “along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord”.

The CNN report on Thursday unearthed posts it said Robinson left on a porn site’s message boards in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI”, said he enjoyed transgender pornography, said in 2012 he preferred Hitler to then-President Barack Obama, and slammed the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr as “worse than a maggot”.

Robinson denied writing the posts and said on Thursday that he wouldn’t be forced out of the race by “salacious tabloid lies”. He avoided directly discussing the controversy during a gubernatorial campaign event on Saturday evening at a racetrack in Fayetteville. That occurred after former president Donald Trump didn’t mention Robinson at a rally earlier in the day about 145 kilometres away in Wilmington.