Madison Cawthorn’s days as a congressman are numbered after losing the Republican primary for his seat to North Carolina state Sen. Chuck Edwards. However, the pathologically deceitful Cawthorn is not simply going to disappear into a right-wing conservative operative career without some of his legal baggage trailing after him.
Axios reports that along with the numerous investigations into Cawthorn’s strange campaign finances, a super PAC that had been focused on dethroning the ineffectual lawmaker filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics concerning the money he was spending in order to have his cousin around, and how he went about disclosing those finances. The complaint points out that Stephen L. Smith has been treated to gifts from the Cawthorn coffers for travel and lodging, and has also received loans as a member of Cawthorn’s House staff.
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Stephen L. Smith is Cawthorn’s roommate and cousin, according to the complaint, and their social media posts “indicate a personal relationship between them, separate and apart from the professional relationship of employer and employee.” A representative for Cawthorn has called the complaints “ridiculous,” and described their relationship as a familial one. "Stephen is his cousin — they're family.” As Business Insider explains:
Smith may indeed be Cawthorn's distant relative. In a 2017 deposition, Cawthorn calls Smith his third cousin, "once removed," and notes that Smith was at the time working as a "hospitality professional" at Chick-fil-A, and living with him.
The group says that the loans and gifts that Smith has received from Cawthorn break the rules of House financial disclosures. The general whiff of an attack on his personal relationships cannot be ignored. It’s low-hanging, GOP-style, homophobic bullshit that they are implying in regard to Cawthorn. However, the fact of the matter is, his short-lived congressional career has been filled with a never-ending stream of scandal, law breaking, and ethics violations that have everything to do with fraud and money and nothing to do with who he has intimate relationships with.
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The civil war taking place inside of the GOP has only led to a steady stream of recent accusations of financial irresponsibility and shadiness on Cawthorn’s part. It seems that the somewhat incompetent self-promoter has left himself open to all kinds of investigations into how much and with what funds he was paying his staff these past couple of years. Whether Cawthorn was getting out in front of these stories or was courting them, much of this ugliness came to the forefront after the increasingly unstable Cawthorn went on a podcast and claimed Republican members of Congress were engaged in all kinds of non-conservative Christian sexual activities and illicit drug use.
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Since then, Cawthorn has been associated with one scandal after another. The more damning stuff has been directed at Cawthorn’s (somehow) more transparent than most MAGA-types, financial scumbarggery, which consists of alleged pump-and-dump cryptocurrency chicanery as well as messy House ethics salary violations.
Before the 2022 North Carolina primaries revved up the neocon dirt machine, Cawthorn was disappointing people and breaking laws in all kinds of other ways. His participation in the events of Jan. 6, 2021 is still damning, and whether or not he has spent most of his time in Congress illegally stashing firearms on his person is very much a question.
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