Roger Stone, a longtime confidante and ally of Donald Trump, came to the defence of far-right Rep Madison Cawthorn on Thursday in a way the freshman congressman will probably wish he hadn’t.
Speaking with the conspiracy purveyors on Alex Jones’s InfoWars, Mr Stone weighed in on the evolving controversy surrounding Mr Cawthorn’s claim that he had been invited to orgies by veteran figures on Capitol Hill and witnessed others doing cocaine, claiming that he could confirm both practices to be alive and well.
“I can tell you first hand that these parties happen. I can tell you that they continue to happen. I can tell you that Madison Cawthorn told me yesterday that he had not retracted what he said, even though Kevin McCarthy has popped up and is now speaking for the member of Congress,” Mr Stone alleged.
His claims are likely only to fuel the growing animosity that members of the GOP House and Senate caucuses are beginning to express openly towards the 26-year-old Mr Cawthorn, the youngest-serving member of Congress. The original comments by the North Carolina freshman member, made earlier this week, exploded across social media after they were published in a video interview and resulted in Mr Cawthorn being hauled into a meeting with GOP leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise for a dressing-down on Wednesday.
“Some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you. And it’s like, this is wild,” stated the lawmaker.
“He's lost my trust is gonna have to earn it back. And I laid out everything that I find is unbecoming,” said Mr McCarthy of his meeting with Mr Cawthorn after it concluded.
“This is unacceptable. There's no evidence to this. He changes what he [says] and that's not becoming of a Congressman... He did not tell the truth,” added the GOP minority leader, explaining that Mr Cawthorn had either walked back or changed his story about the alleged incidents when confronted.
Others, like one of North Carolina’s US senators, Thom Tillis, are now openly backing efforts to replace the first-term congressman with another Republican. Mr Cawthorn is running in a contested primary after his district was redrawn and he initially chose to run in a new district before the state’s GOP-drawn congressional maps were thrown out, forcing Mr Cawthorn to return to his old district and explain why he initially sought to abandon his seat for a safer one.
“Frankly, if western North Carolina is not going to fix the problem, then leadership will have to,” Rep Steve Womack told Politico, after Mr McCarthy suggested to reporters that GOP leadership could impose consequences on Mr Cawthorn for the remarks.
Mr Stone’s comments on the issue were somewhat notable given his own storied history on the subject of sexual escapades. The former self-described Nixon “dirty trickster” was revealed in an article by the Daily Mail to have been a frequent guest, along with his wife, at Washington DC’s swingers meetups and was a member of Capital Couples, a now-defunct swingers club. As a result, his comment on Thursday that he knew “firsthand” of such parties’ existence raised more than a few eyebrows on Twitter.
The longtime right-wing gadfly also is famously friends with the so-called ‘Manhattan Madam’ Kristin Davis, known for running a high-end prostitution ring in New York that brought down the governorship of Eliot Spitzer, and was living with her up until just days before his house was raided by the FBI in 2019 as part of the Trump-Russia investigation.
