Fleshing out Roy Cooper’s secret list

His “early reentry” list includes 51 convicts who had been sentenced to life in prison. That message can reach moderates.

I got myself into a little bit of trouble over my column in the Observer last week about the connection between former Gov. Roy Cooper and the man charged with murdering Iryna Zarutska. Sometimes you just have to live to fight another day, is all I’ll say.

Anyway, the main point of my column was that this “secret list” of early-release inmates is a big deal, and it’s only going to get worse for the former governor. That is still true.

A lot of Republicans’ early talking points were about how “Roy Cooper let DeCarlos Brown out early.” Technically, that is not true, and thus we get this credulous, hyper-legalistic “fact-check” from the news side of the media.

The link between the Charlotte light rail murder suspect and Cooper turns out to be relatively weak. I fear that the Cooper team is going to use that fact — and Republicans’ tendencies to get too far out over their skis — to dodge accountability for reckless policy yet again.

But there’s so much more to the story that will come out ov…