Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s office is slamming the new super PAC formed to oppose him.
Fire Madison Cawthorn, which was formed on Monday, is the first federal PAC ever to target a specific candidate for office, a fact that Micah Bock, Cawthorn’s communications director, says “comes as no surprise.”
“Rep. Cawthorn continues to place the interests of his constituents over the partisan politicking of liberal special interest groups. … While embittered liberal activists have been weaponized by the Democrat machine in Washington in an effort to silence his voice, Congressman Cawthorn continues to fight for the values of Western North Carolina on the national stage, and he is honored to have the support of so many hard-working North Carolinians in NC-11,” Bock told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday.
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The 25-year-old congressman also commented on the broad scope of opposition he faces less than a year into his first term.
“If I am hated in Washington, D.C., if I am despised and derided by the corporate lobbyists and super PACS of the radical Left, if I am cursed at and spit upon by socialists and activists, then I know I’m doing my job,” Cawthorn told the Washington Examiner. “Washington, D.C., hates me because they fear you.”
The super PAC was co-founded by Col. Moe Davis, a failed candidate who ran in 2020 to replace former Rep. Mark Meadows after he departed Congress for his role as chief of staff to former President Donald Trump, and David Wheeler, an unsuccessful two-time candidate for North Carolina’s state Senate.
Fire Madison Cawthorn said in a press release its sole purpose is to “raise funds to focus on the callous and child-like actions of U.S. Representative David (Madison) Cawthorn.”
“Since his first day in Congress, Madison Cawthorn has been a threat to our democracy,” Davis said. “First, he peddled Trump’s big lie about the election being stolen. Then, he betrayed our country and helped incite the violent attack on our Capitol and our Constitution.”
Wheeler said the PAC is “determined to make [Cawthorn] a one-term Congressman,” hitting the North Carolina Republican for having “spent two weeks on vacation in Dubai posting pictures at the pool drinking beer and showing off more skin than was appropriate in a Muslim nation while he was supposed to be working for us in DC.”
Bock told the Washington Examiner that Cawthorn was in Dubai on his honeymoon, adding the congressman only missed three days’ worth of votes.
Cawthorn was among the GOP legislators who objected to the certification of President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, the day of the U.S. Capitol riot. The congressman explained the basis for his objection in a video posted online, which YouTube then removed for what the company said was a violation of its terms of use. Cawthorn’s team challenged the removal, but the platform did not back down.
“We reached out to them mainly just to develop an understanding that they knew that this was a U.S. representative, that his job was to speak to the American people about why he was making the decisions that he made, and that it was with that knowledge that they still decided to censor his ability to talk to his constituents,” Bock said. “And they said, yes, they knew that, and they stated that he violated their election integrity policy because he contended that there were instances of voter fraud.”
Screenshots of the email exchanges between YouTube and Cawthorn’s office reviewed by the Washington Examiner confirm that a representative for YouTube told Cawthorn’s team the lawmaker’s assertion that there were “massive late night mail-in ballot drops in key swing states, the corrupted election technology, illegal counting practices, dead voters, and mathematically impossible vote irregularities” in the 2020 election violated YouTube’s policy prohibiting content that “advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of any past U.S. presidential election.”
Bock maintained that up until 2020, “it was never a debate whether or not election fraud existed,” but rather that there was “only a debate as to the extent of it.”
Federal and state elections officials have said there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 contest, and dozens of legal challenges were rejected in the courts.
Cawthorn spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally outside the White House on the same day a mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 that disrupted the process of affirming the 2020 presidential election results. The House of Representatives impeached Trump, charging him with inciting an insurrection for his words and actions leading up to the siege. Trump was then acquitted by the Senate.
The former president was first impeached on two Ukraine-related charges in 2019 before being acquitted in the GOP-led Senate.
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Legislators from both parties have objected to the certification of certain states’ votes in years past. Seven House Democrats tried to object to electoral votes from multiple states carried by Trump in 2016, with some alleging widespread voter suppression or Russian interference in the 2016 election, but they did not succeed in getting the objections considered since they did not have a senator to sign off on any of them.
Representatives for Google, YouTube’s parent company, did not immediately offer comment in response to the Washington Examiner’s email about the removal of Cawthorn’s video.
