Are there boatloads of cocaine, orgies, and other non-traditional conservative-Christian things happening in the Grand Old Party, the way Rep. Madison Cawthorn alleges? Possibly. The fact of the matter is that leak after leak of “scandalous” videos, all tainted by the stench of right-wing operatives, continues to come out in the weeks preceding North Carolina’s May 17 GOP primaries. Many in the neocon wing of the Republican Party would like to see Cawthorn retire from Washington, D.C., to go off and sell dubious crypto-currency and party in Florida.
The videos of Cawthorn in various states of possible inebriation and doing cosplay are truly uninteresting. Unless one of those videos shows Cawthorn admitting to something illegal or participating in some Satanic ritual (which would be incongruous with his “Christian” stances on things), they are very archaic political hack attacks. In fact, they tend to distract from the laundry list of things, both legal and very illegal, Cawthorn has done that should have (long ago) disqualified him from representing anyone and anything more than Madison Cawthorn.
On Thursday, the Daily Beast released a report showing that Mr. Cawthorn seems to have opened himself up to yet another ethics violation investigation. This time it is spending a boatload of money to overpay his chief of staff, Blake Harp.
RELATED STORY: Republicans freaking out about Madison Cawthorn's allegations of 'cocaine' and 'orgies'
RELATED STORY: Rep. Madison Cawthorn uses important veteran affairs committee hearing to clean a gun
According to the report, Harp received $131,278 in 2021. The good news is that this puts Harp’s salary on “the low end of compensation for chiefs of staff in Congress.” The bad news is that it seems Mr. Harp’s seemingly low salary might be an attempt by Cawthorn to cover up the fact that “Cawthorn’s campaign paid Harp a combined $73,237 in direct payments and payments to his LLC, EMP Strategies.” Why is that “bad news,” you might ask?
Co-founder of Sister District, Gaby Goldstein, joins The Downballot to discuss what Democrats in the states are doing to protect abortion rights
If someone is considered “senior” staff—someone, like, say, your chief of staff—it is stipulated that they cannot make more than $29,595 in “outside income” per year. Let me get out my calculator: $73,237 is way more than $29,595. I did those calculations twice and feel pretty confident that this equation is correct: 73,237 > 29,595. Now, it turns out that Harp’s low-end salary seems to be an attempt at keeping him from being considered “senior staff,” and in so doing allowing Cawthorn’s campaign—with all of its strange “costs”—to let Harp wet his beak.
But the ethics rules don’t calculate senior pay at an annual rate; the pay rate is calculated per every 90-day period. And that’s where they slipped up, paying Harp at a senior rate in the last quarter of 2021.
Before Q4, Harp’s top quarterly pay was $32,499.99. But the office bumped that up to $34,499 over the last three months of the year—a total of 92 days—for a daily pay rate of $374.99. The daily rate for senior staff in 2021 was $363.16.
Teehee. This means that Cawthorn and friends’ attempt at creative accounting did not work because Harp is definitely making the daily rate of a “senior staff” member in Congress. that doesn’t mean anything to Cawthorn’s communications director, Luke Ball, who told the Beast that harp didn’t qualify as senior staff. Ball also said that the Daily Beast “refused to provide our office the information they alleged was at the center of their request.” Of course, the problem here is that congressional staff salaries are public record.
To add to the dubiousness of everything, Mr. Harp seems to have had a shell LLC set up to fuzz up the fact that Harp is receiving that money. Coincidentally, Harp’s LLC has “received tens of thousands of dollars from a PAC belonging to Harp’s mom.” To put this into perspective, in 2017, the Office of Congressional Ethics investigated the late Rep. John Lewis’ Chief of Staff, Michael Collins, for making $250 more than the limit in outside salary.
RELATED STORY: It looks like Madison Cawthorn tried to get on plane with a loaded gun