The complaint cites recent controversy surrounding the warlike 26-year-old lawmaker, including twice being found with a loaded gun at airport security and promoting a cryptocurrency.
It also raises concerns about alleged gifts to the congressman’s programmer, who is his distant cousin, but their long-standing personal friendship and other exceptions to House rules governing gifts make the situation murky.
The complaint was filed in the Congressional Ethics Office Wednesday by the anti-Cawthorn American Muckrakers PAC, commonly known as the Fire Madison, and comes less than three weeks before the May 17 Cawthorn primary, which faces many skeptics.
Cawthorn broadcasts news of recent scandals as part of a “coordinated drop campaign” and criticizes some recent attacks for focusing on malicious videos and images rather than policies. A video included in the ethics complaint, first reported by the Daily Mail, showed Cawthorn with his programmer in a car talking about evocative topics with an excessive accent.
“Digging things up in my early 20s to get dirty is pathetic,” Cawthorn wrote on Twitter on Friday. “At least be consistent with your attack instead of changing your focus every time. “A campaign based on nothing but slander and personal attacks is a campaign that has no real sense of how to save the country from the left.”
David Wheeler, chairman of the PAC v. Cawthorn, said he was trying to make the information he received about Cawthorn public as soon as possible. His team was also behind the recent release of a secretly recorded audio with a former Cawthorn employee who called Cawthorn a “common liar” and accused him of firing her illegally.
“The drip is a fact,” Wheeler told The Hill. “I know you probably will not believe it because you are in Washington, but we are trying to get things done quickly and not just for strategic reasons, just because we think it is in the public interest to just get them out. and let people figure it out on their own. “
The ethics complaint refers to two cases where Cawthorn carried a loaded firearm through a Transportation Safety Administration checkpoint: Once in Asheville, NC in February 2021 and another time in Charlotte on Tuesday.
He later claimed that Cawthorn had brought a knife to the school property four times. A local news report reported that the evidence that Cawthorn did this was not conclusive in some cases, and in another that he gave a pocket knife to law enforcement to keep it.
The complaint also cited a Washington Examiner report released this week that Cawthorn may have violated commercial intelligence laws by promoting a “Let’s Go Brandon” cryptocurrency. Senator Thom Tillis (RN.C.), who has backed one of Cawthorn’s opponents, also called for an ethical inquiry into Cawthorn based on the report.
Finally, the complaint raises concerns about Cawthorn’s financial and personal relationship with his developer, accompanied by screenshots of social media posts, Venmo transactions from years before Cawthorn took office, and records proving that they lived together. He claims that Cawthorn gave his developer free rent, paid him to travel and lent him money, all without revealing it. This is a breach of the House’s ethics, he argues, but there is plenty of ambiguity about the situation.
Cawthorn developer Stephen Smith is his distant cousin. Cawthorn described Smith as “my granddaughter’s sister’s grandson” in a 2017 filing for insurance damages from his car accident – the accident that put him in a wheelchair.
Social media posts show that they have been stuck together for years and traveled abroad before Cawthorn ran. In an Instagram post in 2019, Smith described that he helped Cawthorn in physical therapy and said that Cawthorn had become more of a brother than a cousin.
Cawthorn said in his 2017 testimony that the two were roommates and a Federal Election Commission filing showed Smith was using Cawthorn’s address in December 2021. A Cawthorn spokesman confirmed that the two were roommates, but said they were not most. Cawthorn has not stated that it received rental income in the financial statements, so it is unclear whether Smith paid rent.
The complaint does not provide compelling evidence that Cawthorn paid Smith to travel or that Cawthorn made loans to Smith that have not been repaid. Cawthorn’s office said a claim in the complaint that Smith was accompanying Cawthorn on his honeymoon was incorrect.
Even though Cawthorn provided great gifts to Smith in the form of housing and travel, the breach of the House Rules is not clear.
Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government ethics at Project on Government Oversight, told The Hill that any of Cawthorn’s gifts to Smith may be within the bounds of House rules due to exceptions that allow gifts from direct superiors to employees or exemptions. that allow gifts based on personal friendship.
“There is some ambiguity that needs to be clarified,” said Hedtler-Gaudette. “That is exactly why you are referring something to the Ethics Committee. “Obviously they will check and compare what really happened with the House’s real rules about gifts.”
Craig Holman of the Public Citizen monitoring team agreed that gifts from Cawthorn to a staff member would probably not break the rules, but any failure to disclose loans could be an issue.
“Cawthorn is indeed obliged to disclose loans,” Holman said. “The other allegations of confidentiality and other allegations are also well-founded.”
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Hiring close friends from Cawthorn for his offices in Congress can also raise image problems for him, although it is not prohibited by House rules. Cawthorn Chief of Staff Blake Harp is also a longtime friend.
“When you hire your friends or hire your relatives, it’s like nepotism, patronage, to some degree,” said Hedtler-Gaudette, adding that such moves could “feed” public opinion that, as “everything is corrupt and everything it’s just, you know, coquettishness. “
– Updated at 5:32 p.m.
