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Judge blocks effort to keep Cawthorn off NC ballots :: WRAL.com

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By Travis Fain, WRAL state government reporter

Wilmington, N.C. — A federal judge Friday blocked an effort to keep U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn off North Carolina ballot this year, saying the state’s election board can’t proceed with an inquiry that would have delved his role leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Chief District Court Judge Richard Myers said he couldn’t allow the challenge, filed by attorneys looking to label the first-term Republican as an insurrectionist who should be legally barred from the ballot, to move forward. The courts, Myers said, must protect the soapbox, the ballot box and the jury box.

“When those fail, that’s when people proceed to the ammunition box,” said Myers, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump.

The next step remains unclear. The North Carolina State Board of Elections could appeal Myers’ decision, but the legal team representing the board declined to say whether the board will do so. An elections board spokesman said the board was reviewing the court’s decision, which came down a bit before 12:30 p.m.

John Wallace, a lawyer for voters who had challenged Cawthorn’s candidacy at the state level, said his group could try to intervene in the federal court proceeding, but that could prove difficult. Those challengers had hoped the elections board would convene an inquiry panel next week under the North Carolina laws that allow voters to challenge a candidate’s qualifications. That panel could have subpoenaed and deposed Cawthorn, as well as others, and Cawthorn sued in federal court to stop the process.

The challengers alleged that, by stoking protestors’ anger at a Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C., Cawthorn triggered Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which was written after the Civil War to keep Confederates out of key government jobs, including the U.S. Congress. Cawthorn has denied he engaged in any insurrection. His attorney, Jim Bopp, said Friday that it’s insulting to equate Cawthorn’s rally speech and other comments with taking up arms against the country.

But beyond that, Bopp argued that a law Congress passed in 1872 removed rules against insurrectionists running for Congress. Myers backed that argument Friday, ruling from the bench after about 90 minutes of oral arguments that the 1872 law didn’t just absolve Confederates, it also allows future insurrectionists to run for office.

Terence Steed, who represented the state elections board Friday on behalf of the state attorney general’s office, had called that argument “absurd.” He gave an example, telling Myers that, if the judge cleared his courtroom of rowdy audience members, then let them back in, no one would take that to mean future audiences had license to disrupt court proceedings.

But in his ruling, Myers backed Bopp’s interpretation—that the plain language of the 1872 law reads as prospective as well as retrospective. If that wasn’t Congress’s intent, Myers said, Congress could have voted to fix it any time over the past 150 years.

Myers also noted the tight timetable at this point in the election cycle. Candidate filing in congressional and other races closed Friday at noon, and state election officials have a number of deadlines to hit in the coming weeks to prepare for the May 17 primaries.

If a state elections board inquiry ultimately kept Cawthorn off the ballot, the primary elections would likely be decided before his appeals on that decision could run their full course, which could have gone as high as the U.S. Supreme Court.

That inquiry was expected to begin next week. And under North Carolina’s candidate challenge rules, Cawthorn would have had the burden of proving he didn’t engage in insurrection.

The process was closely watched and seen as a potential avenue for similar challenges against members of Congress in other states who backed Trump’s false allegations that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

“Greatly disappointed,” said Wallace, who monitored the hearing Friday for the challengers and has also represented the state Democratic Party. “We will need to consider whether a next step is warranted.”

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Madison Cawthorn Cleans Gun During Veterans Affairs Hearing

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The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee took Wednesday as an opportunity to hold a virtual hearing on how toxic chemicals are killing U.S. soldiers. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) took the hearing as an opportunity to clean his gun.

Cawthorn, the youngest current member of Congress, fiddled with his black pistol while one witness explained how university medical researchers could help the government examine how burn pits are harming military service members.

“It was immature. He’s a child. He lacks common sense. I think the congressman was overcompensating for something that he lacks and feeling inadequate among the heroes on that call,” said John Feal, a 9/11 first responder who was at the virtual meeting.

Feal was one of at least two people at the Veterans’ Affairs meeting who noticed what Cawthorn was doing. Both were infuriated. But the general public couldn’t see it, because the two-hour virtual hearing was held over Zoom—which meant that those tuning in could only see the person speaking.

Cawthorn worked on his pistol out of sight for several minutes, two people told The Daily Beast, but it became plainly visible during the testimony of Jen Burch, a veteran who spent six years in the Air Force serving in Japan and Afghanistan.

From the layout of the office behind him, Cawthorn appeared to be in his congressional office at the time, but The Daily Beast could not immediately confirm his location. (Although firearm possession is generally illegal in the District of Columbia, members of Congress have carved out a special rule that allows them to maintain guns in their offices.)

The Daily Beast asked Cawthorn’s office if the congressman thought this an appropriate time to clean his firearm. His communications director, Luke Ball, responded: “What could possibly be more patriotic than guns and veterans?”

During the live recorded meeting, which ran close to three hours, politicians listened to veteran advocacy groups discuss how uniformed military personnel have been exposed to dangerous toxins when ordered to stand by burn pits—an ill-conceived method of burning trash at military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

That grimy duty usually fell to low-ranking soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, some of whom developed heart, lung, and digestive ailments after hours of standing over smoke from the burning plastics, rubber, and paper envelopes from families back home.

Rosie Lopez Torres, the cofounder of Burn Pits 360, told The Daily Beast that she did not notice that Cawthorn was working on his gun. She only recalled that he seemed distracted at times. But when she saw the picture of what he was doing, she was livid.

“Oh wow,” she said. “That is insane. Total disregard and disrespect to America’s war fighters. He was so bored with the topic. Those that are sick and dying and the widows in his district should see how much he cares about the issue.”

Some may find that criticism particularly notable, given that Cawthorn has made a name for himself by constantly singing praises about the nation’s military personnel. The glory of military service is also at the core of the public persona he built: he rose to prominence with a heart wrenching story about how a car crash took away his ability to walk and left him permanently in a wheelchair before he could enter the United States Naval Academy and begin a life of military service.

Journalist Tom Fiedler would eventually uncover how that story was built on a lie, because the Naval Academy had already rejected Cawthorn before his crash. And the friend Cawthorn claimed had left him for dead, in fact, pulled him from the wreckage.

Cawthorn’s behavior would have gone unnoticed on Wednesday were it not for Lindsay Church, the cofounder of Minority Veterans of America, who also spoke during the meeting. They tweeted out a picture of the congressman holding his gun backwards and wrote, “Imagine you showed up for a Zoom meeting and a colleague decided that was when he needed to clean his gun. Because that’s what happened today in a Congressional roundtable on toxic exposure. We’re better than this.”

Church later told The Daily Beast that Cawthorn’s behavior was “misguided and lacking the dignity of his office.”

“He was doing this while the ranking member of his own party was conducting actual business. I’d be mad as hell if I was Bost,” Church said.

The office of Rep. Michael Bost (R-IL), the top Republican on that committee, did not immediately respond to questions Thursday afternoon.

This isn’t the first time the 26-year-old congressman has been irresponsible with this gun.

In February 2021, he tried to board a plane in his home state of North Carolina while he still had his 9mm Glock pistol inside his bag. Cawthorn was not arrested, and his spokesman at the time chalked it up to a simple mistake—though federal airport security guards regularly detain and fine average Americans for doing the same thing.

According to CBS, the Transportation Security Administration confiscated a record 5,674 guns at airport checkpoints last year.



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Voters move to block Trump ally Madison Cawthorn from re-election | Republicans

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A group of North Carolina voters told state officials on Monday that they want Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn to be disqualified as a congressional candidate, citing his involvement in the 6 January attack on the Capitol.

Cawthorn questioned the outcome of the presidential election during the “Save America Rally” before the Capitol riot later that day that resulted in five deaths.

At the rally, Cawthorn made baseless claims that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump, and has been accused of firing up the crowd, many of whom went on to storm the Capitol.

Lawyers filed the candidacy challenge on behalf of 11 voters with North Carolina’s board of elections, which oversees a process by which candidate qualifications are scrutinized.

The voters say Cawthorn, who formally filed as a candidate last month, cannot run because he fails to comply with an amendment in the constitution ratified shortly after the civil war.

The 1868 amendment says no one can serve in Congress “who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”.

The written challenge says the events on 6 January “amounted to an insurrection”, and that Cawthorn’s speech at the rally supporting Trump, his other comments, and information in published reports, provide a “reasonable suspicion or belief” that he helped facilitate the insurrection and is thus disqualified.

“Challengers have reasonable suspicion that Representative Cawthorn was involved in efforts to intimidate Congress and the Vice-President into rejecting valid electoral votes and subvert the essential constitutional function of an orderly and peaceful transition of power,” the complaint read.

The complaint went on to detail the ways Cawthorn allegedly promoted the demonstration ahead of time, including him tweeting: “The future of this republic hinges on the actions of a solitary few … It’s time to fight.” The complaint also details reports of Cawthorn meeting with planners of the 6 January demonstration and possibly the Capitol assault.

Cawthorn, 26, became the youngest member of Congress after his November 2020 election, and has become a social media favorite of Trump supporters. He plans to run in a new district that appears friendlier to Republicans. He formally filed candidacy papers just before filing was suspended while redistricting lawsuits are pending.

Last September, Cawthorn warned North Carolinians of potential “bloodshed” over future elections he claims could “continue to be stolen”, and questioned whether Biden was “dutifully elected”. He advised them to begin amassing ammunition for what he said is likely American-v-American “bloodshed” over unfavorable election results.

“When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes your duty,” he said, in addition to describing the rioters who were arrested during the 6 January insurrection as “political prisoners”. He said “we are actively working” on plans for a similar protest in Washington.

Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech for People, a national election and campaign finance reform group backing the challenge to Cawthorn, told the Guardian the complaint was “the first legal challenge to a candidate’s eligibility under the disqualification clause filed since post-civil war Reconstruction in the 19th century”.

He said: “It sets a line that says that just as the framers of the 14th amendment wrote and intended, you can’t take an oath to support the constitution and then facilitate an insurrection against the United States while expecting to pursue public office.”

Fein said the challenge will be the first of many against members of Congress associated with the insurrection. Free Speech for People and the group Our Revolution announced last week they would urge state administrators to bar Trump and members of Congress from future ballots.

He said: “This isn’t just about the voters of that district. The insurrection threatened our country’s entire democratic system and putting insurrectionists from any state into the halls of Congress threatens the entire country.”

The challenge asks the board to create a five-member panel from counties within the proposed 13th district to hear the challenge. The panel’s decision can be appealed to the state board and later to court.

The challengers also asked the board to let them question Cawthorn under oath in a deposition before the regional panel convenes, and to subpoena him and others to obtain documents.

John Wallace, a longtime lawyer for Democratic causes in North Carolina, who also filed the challenge, told the Guardian: “The disqualification of Representative Cawthorn certainly should provide a deterrent to others who might try and obstruct or defeat our democratic processes.”

A Cawthorn spokesperson, Luke Ball, said “over 245,000 patriots from western North Carolina elected Congressman Cawthorn to serve them in Washington” – a reference to his November 2020 victory in the current 11th district.

Now “a dozen activists who are comically misinterpreting and twisting the 14th amendment for political gain will not distract him from that service,” Ball wrote.

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Voters move to block Trump ally Madison Cawthorn from re-election | Republicans

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A group of North Carolina voters told state officials on Monday that they want Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn to be disqualified as a congressional candidate, citing his involvement in the 6 January attack on the Capitol.

Cawthorn questioned the outcome of the presidential election during the “Save America Rally” before the Capitol riot later that day that resulted in five deaths.

At the rally, Cawthorn made baseless claims that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump, and has been accused of firing up the crowd, many of whom went on to storm the Capitol.

Lawyers filed the candidacy challenge on behalf of 11 voters with North Carolina’s board of elections, which oversees a process by which candidate qualifications are scrutinized.

The voters say Cawthorn, who formally filed as a candidate last month, cannot run because he fails to comply with an amendment in the constitution ratified shortly after the civil war.

The 1868 amendment says no one can serve in Congress “who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”.

The written challenge says the events on 6 January “amounted to an insurrection”, and that Cawthorn’s speech at the rally supporting Trump, his other comments, and information in published reports, provide a “reasonable suspicion or belief” that he helped facilitate the insurrection and is thus disqualified.

“Challengers have reasonable suspicion that Representative Cawthorn was involved in efforts to intimidate Congress and the Vice-President into rejecting valid electoral votes and subvert the essential constitutional function of an orderly and peaceful transition of power,” the complaint read.

The complaint went on to detail the ways Cawthorn allegedly promoted the demonstration ahead of time, including him tweeting: “The future of this republic hinges on the actions of a solitary few … It’s time to fight.” The complaint also details reports of Cawthorn meeting with planners of the 6 January demonstration and possibly the Capitol assault.

Cawthorn, 26, became the youngest member of Congress after his November 2020 election, and has become a social media favorite of Trump supporters. He plans to run in a new district that appears friendlier to Republicans. He formally filed candidacy papers just before filing was suspended while redistricting lawsuits are pending.

Last September, Cawthorn warned North Carolinians of potential “bloodshed” over future elections he claims could “continue to be stolen”, and questioned whether Biden was “dutifully elected”. He advised them to begin amassing ammunition for what he said is likely American-v-American “bloodshed” over unfavorable election results.

“When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes your duty,” he said, in addition to describing the rioters who were arrested during the January 6 insurrection as “political prisoners”. He said “we are actively working” on plans for a similar protest in Washington.

Ron Fein, legal director of Free Speech for People, a national election and campaign finance reform group backing the challenge to Cawthorn, told the Guardian the complaint was “the first legal challenge to a candidate’s eligibility under the disqualification clause filed since post civil war reconstruction in the 19th century.”

He said: “It sets a line that says that just as the framers of the 14th amendment wrote and intended, you can’t take an oath to support the constitution and then facilitate an insurrection against the United States while expecting to pursue public office.”

Fein said the challenge will be the first of many against members of Congress associated with the insurrection. Free Speech for People and the group Our Revolution announced last week they would urge state administrators to bar Trump and members of Congress from future ballots.

He said: “This isn’t just about the voters of that district. The insurrection threatened our country’s entire democratic system and putting insurrectionists from any state into the halls of Congress threatens the entire country.”

The challenge asks the board to create a five-member panel from counties within the proposed 13th district to hear the challenge. The panel’s decision can be appealed to the state board and later to court.

The challengers also asked the board to let them question Cawthorn under oath in a deposition before the regional panel convenes, and to subpoena him and others to obtain documents.

John Wallace, a longtime lawyer for Democratic causes in North Carolina, who also filed the challenge, told the Guardian: “The disqualification of Representative Cawthorn certainly should provide a deterrent to others who might try and obstruct or defeat our democratic processes.”

Cawthorn spokesperson Luke Ball said “over 245,000 patriots from western North Carolina elected Congressman Cawthorn to serve them in Washington” – a reference to his November 2020 victory in the current 11th district.

Now “a dozen activists who are comically misinterpreting and twisting the 14th amendment for political gain will not distract him from that service,” Ball wrote.

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Cawthorn calls on Harris to invoke 25th Amendment and remove Biden as president over Afghanistan crisis

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U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a freshman Republican from North Carolina, is calling on Vice President Kamala Harris to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove President Biden from office following the deadly, botched withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

“Our nation is at a crisis point,” he wrote in a letter to Harris and the rest of the cabinet Thursday.

He warned of China’s ambitions on the world stage, the resurgent Russia, rising inflation, chaos at the southern border and other global predicaments threatening the U.S. – and argued that confronting them will take strong, decisive leadership.

“Joe Biden’s physical inability to lead is not a political talking point – it’s a demonstrable fact,” Cawthorn told Fox News on Thursday evening. “He is not mentally fit to serve as president of the United States.”

Rep. Madison Cawthorn and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Reuters/AP)

The congressman said he does not believe Biden is capable of serving as commander-in-chief following the disastrous U.S. pullout of Afghanistan, which has left thousands of Afghan allies stranded, the country in Taliban hands and the most Americans killed in a single attack in Afghanistan in over a decade.

BIDEN, TRUMP CAMPS PLAY BLAME GAME AS SITUATION IN AFGHANISTAN CONTINUES TO DETERIORATE

“I cannot sit idly by and watch the nation that I love spiral into death and devastation because our leader cannot discharge his duties,” he said. “There is no time to wait, the time for action is now.”

In his letter to Harris, he wrote that as a member of the president’s inner circle and a former presidential primary debate opponent, she has seen clearer than anyone Biden’s “current cognitive limitations.”

“As the person that works closest with the president, you are also the one who best knows the differences between the perception the West Wing wants to project and the ugly reality,” he added.

AFGHAN ALLIES TRAPPED BEHIND TALIBAN LINES TURN TO PRAYERS AND UNOFFICIAL CHANNELS AS AUG. 31 DEADLINE NEARS

The White House did not immediately respond to an after-hours request for comment on the letter.

The request comes hours after a terrorist bombing outside Kabul’s U.S.-held airport left at least 13 American service members dead – 10 Marines, two Army soldiers and a Navy corpsman.

In a statement Thursday night, Harris honored the victims.

“These courageous servicemembers died while saving countless lives,” she said. “They are heroes.”

She said she and her family were grieving for the Afghan civilians killed in the same attack.

“Our country is grateful to all our women and men in uniform, and in particular, those working today to get Americans and our Afghan partners out of harm’s way,” she said. “And we will complete that mission. Today, we honor those who gave their lives in service to their nation. We will never forget.”

In a news briefing earlier, Biden pledged to hunt down and kill the terrorists responsible, but critics have blasted his response as confusing and inadequate, especially after the U.S. withdrawal severely curtailed intelligence capabilities in the war-torn country, angered NATO allies and raised fears that hundreds of U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of Afghan allies may be stranded behind enemy lines – at risk of death at the hands of the Taliban.

REP. MADISON CAWTHORN SLAMS LIBS’ ‘SWAMPY BACKDOOR TACTICS’ IN SURPRISE SPEECH AT NORTH CAROLINA SCHOOL BOARD MEETING

“The Constitution provides us a remedy,” Cawthorn wrote. “Section 4 of the 25th Amendment lays out the process by which the sitting president may be removed from office for inability to ‘discharge the powers and duties of his office.’”

Then he urged her to start the process.

“I recognize the enormity of this request, yet that enormity is dwarfed by the scale of the consequences that face our country,” he wrote.

Other leading Republicans have called on Biden to resign over the Afghan crisis.

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White House press secretary Jen Psaki addressed those lawmakers earlier Thursday, saying it was “not a day for politics” in the wake of the suspected ISIS-K bombing that killed more than a dozen service members.

“We would expect that any American, whether they are elected or not, would stand with us in our commitment to going after and fighting and killing those terrorists wherever they live and to honoring the lives of service members, that’s what this day is for,” she said during her daily news briefing.

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Madison Cawthorn: GOP congressman who voted to overturn election results admits 2020 race not fraudulent

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The freshman congressman made the comments to CNN’s Pamela Brown when pressed about his lingering views on the November election results.

Cawthorn was one of more than 120 House GOP members who voted to sustain the objection to electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania earlier this month when Congress met to to certify President-elect Biden’s victory.

“Yes, I think I would say that the election was not fraudulent. You know, the Constitution allowed for us to be able to push back as much as we could and I did that to the amount of the constitutional limits that I had at my disposal. So now I would say that Joseph R. Biden is our president,” he added.

There have been no credible allegations of any issues with voting that would have impacted the election, as affirmed by dozens of state and federal courts, governors, state election officials and the departments of Homeland Security and Justice. And not one of the Republican officeholders objecting to Biden’s victory have objected to Trump’s wins, or in some cases their own wins, on the same day.

Since Biden’s inauguration, Cawthorn has signed onto a letter along with 16 other GOP House freshmen, saying they look forward to working with Biden. Notably, Cawthorn is the youngest member of Congress in modern history, according to US House records, at just 25 years old.

“So when I contested to the election, that was within the constitutional guidelines that the framers had set up. But after I’ve done that and the electors and the delegates from each state elected Joe Biden as our president, I respect the office. He is my president, and I want to work with him to make sure that we can bring some meaningful change to the American people,” Cawthorn said.

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