At this point, it’s hard not to think there really was something to North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s offhanded allegations of conservative group-sex soirees and coke-horking. Despite abashedly — if half-heartedly — walking back his assertion that he’d both been invited to orgies and seen hard drug use during his brief time in Congress so far, the timing of Cawthorn’s claims conspicuously lines up with an ongoing deluge of embarrassing and incriminating opposition research seemingly designed to poison his political future among Republican voters.
First came the pictures of Cawthorn dressed in what appeared to be lingerie, which the congressman later claimed were “goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise” from before his congressional run. Next was footage of Cawthorn in a car with a man later identified as his congressional scheduler and aide, muttering about wanting “passion and desire and [...] to see a naked body beneath my hands” as the male passenger briefly gropes the congressman’s crotch. The video was published as part of an ethics complaint against the first-term representative by the Fire Madison Cawthorn/American Muckrakers PAC, a group responsible for a lawsuit attempting to disqualify Cawthorn from re-election for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. And then this week came a new video of Cawthorn, seemingly naked, engaging in some ambiguous shenanigans with another man in what appears to be a hotel bed.
