House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has decided to stand up to one of the most challenging members of his caucus, the already embattled North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn.
McCarthy met with Cawthorn Wednesday afternoon to address Cawthorn’s allegations of being asked by members of Congress to attend cocaine-fueled orgies and claiming he’s seen them do “a key bump of cocaine right in front of” him.
It did not go well.
Axios congressional reporter Alayna Treene reveals McCarthy said Cawthorn has “lost my trust” and “is gonna have to earn it back.”
“And I laid out to everything that I find is unbecoming,” McCarthy said in his unique speech pattern.
“This is unacceptable,” McCarthy continued, unleashing his ire at Cawthorn. “There’s no evidence to this. Um, He changes what he tells and that’s not becoming of a Congressman he left. He did not tell the truth … that’s unacceptable.”
“The Constitution gives you the age when you can serve in Congress. But when you’re in Congress, you should respect the institution and you should focus on the work that you should do,” McCarthy said, Treene adds.
McCarthy did not hold back what Cawthorn told him, which is damning for the youngest member of the House: “In the interview, he claims he watched people do cocaine. Then when he comes in he tells me, he says he thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage from 100 yards away.”
Cawthorn last week had said on a podcast, presumably about his fellow GOP lawmakers, “I look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life.”
“Then all of the sudden you get invited to, ‘Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes, you should come,’” Cawthorn claimed.
“I’m like, ‘What did you just ask me to come to?’” he added. “And then you realize they are asking you to come to an orgy.
“Or the fact that, you know, some of the people that are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country and then you watch them do, you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you and it’s like, wow, this is wild,” he reportedly also said.