The House Freedom Caucus, considered to be the most conservative bloc within the House Republican Conference, is calling on Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) to name names after he claimed some of his fellow members of Congress have invited him to orgies in Washington and snorted cocaine right in front of him.
Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) said he plans to talk to Cawthorn, a member of the caucus, about his allegations.
“I think it is important, if you’re going to say something like that, to name names,” Perry said in an interview with Politico.
“Perry wouldn’t say whether the caucus would consider booting Cawthorn if he didn’t name names or share evidence to back up his salacious claims,” the political website said, adding that members of the caucus met Monday.
“And I haven’t talked to him at all, so I don’t want to predispose the conversation,” Perry added.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) also said he planned to speak to Cawthorn about the allegations, The Hill reported.
Cawthorn’s claims have exploded around Washington, D.C.
“The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington. I mean, being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70 — [you] look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics,” Cawthorn said in an interview on Thursday, the New York Post reported.
“Then all of a sudden you get invited: ‘We’re going to have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.’ ‘What did you just ask me to come to?’ And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy,” he added.
Cawthorn, 26, also said he has seen leading national anti-addiction officials do cocaine. “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,” Cawthorn said. “And it’s like, this is wild.”
In an interview with John Lovell on the “Warrior Poet Society” podcast last week, Cawthorn was asked if Washington resembles the former Netflix series “House of Cards,” which featured rampant corruption.
“I heard a former president that we had in the ’90s was asked a question about this,” Cawthorn said. “And he gave an answer that I thought was so true. He said that the only thing not accurate in that show—that you could never get a piece of legislation about education passed that quickly.”
“Cawthorn appears to be quoting from a 2015 Gotham magazine interview with Kevin Spacey in which Spacey, the star of House of Cards, said Bill Clinton told him ’99 percent of what you do on that show is real.’ The 1 percent that he got wrong? ‘[Y]ou could never get an education bill passed that fast,'” Mediaite reported.
Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent, and ran the Drudge Report from 2010 to 2015. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.