House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) appears to have had enough of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) and his “orgy” allegations.
“There’s a lot of different things that can happen,” McCarthy told Politico after a sit-down with the freshman legislator. “But I just told him he’s lost my trust. He’s going to have to earn it back. I mean, he’s got a lot of members very upset.”
Last week, Cawthorn, a “Big Lie” proponent, appeared on the “Warrior Poet Society” podcast, a show hosted by NRA instructor John Lovell, and claimed he’d witnessed all sorts of “sexual perversion” in Washington.
When Lovell asked Cawthorn to compare the Kevin Spacey series House of Cards with real life as a member of Congress, the 26-year-old Republican said, “I’ve always paid attention to politics guys that, you know, then all of the sudden you get invited to like, well, hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes. You should come there, like, What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy.
“Or the fact that there’s some of the people that are leading…the movement to try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them doing a key bump of cocaine right in front of you and it’s like, Wow, this is wild,” he continued.
The remarks caused an uproar among numerous GOPers, and McCarthy confronted Cawthorn during the meeting on Wednesday, according to CNN Capitol Hill reporter Melania Zanona.
“You can’t make statements like that as a member of Congress, it affects everybody else and the country as a whole,” McCarthy told Politico, suggesting that Cawthorn may not have been entirely truthful about what he claims to have observed up close.
Perhaps Cawthorn “thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage maybe 100 yards away,” McCarthy told the outlet, saying that Cawthorn “doesn’t know what cocaine is.”
“It is just frustrating,” he said. “There is no evidence behind his statements.”
McCarthy later told CNN that Cawthorn confessed to having “either exaggerated or made up” the story.
“He did not tell the truth,” McCarthy fumed. “That’s unacceptable.”
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) was also in the room on Wednesday and told Politico that he and McCarthy told Cawthorn that they have “real concern with some of the things that he’s done recently. And obviously, the ball’s in his court in terms of how to respond.”
On Tuesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) called Cawthorn “an embarrassment.”
A short time before casually floating the “coke-fueled-orgies” tale, Cawthorn was called out by legislators on both sides of the aisle for describing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “a thug.” He is also currently facing misdemeanor charges after being caught driving with a revoked license for the second time in five years.
Last year, more than two dozen of Cawthorn’s former college classmates described multiple instances of alleged sexual misconduct by the future lawmaker while attending a small Christian school in Virginia.