Things just keep getting worse for this guy. Which, frankly, I'm OK with.
Cawthorn Campaign Illegally Spent Funds It Wasn’t Supposed to Touch
Madison Cawthorn’s campaign wasn’t supposed to touch the money it had for the general election. Guess what the campaign did.
www.thedailybeast.com
With two weeks to go until a primary election he was fated to lose, Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) was already underwater. His campaign held more than twice as much debt as it had cash on hand, the donor well was dry, and he and his staff were months into a madcap spending streak that one campaign source called “baffling.”
And now, after indeed losing that primary, there’s no money to pay the piper.
Specifically, there’s no money to repay the supporters who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance to Cawthorn’s election efforts beyond the primary—to the general election he now won’t be competing in.
Cawthorn is required by law to refund those donations. Instead, according to a campaign source, the campaign already spent the money.
The public doesn’t know any of this yet, however, because the Cawthorn campaign is now a week late in submitting the quarterly Federal Election Commission report that would disclose the collapse. That delay will already trigger an automatic fine.
The breach of fiduciary obligations follows a string of personal and professional embarrassments that hounded the one-term congressman across the weeks and months leading up to his primary defeat—accusations of insider trading, multiple alleged ethics violations, unforced public gaffes, and photo and video leaks designed to humiliate him.
But the campaign’s financial washout is more than another embarrassment; it’s against the law.
“Nobody ever did the math, which baffled me because the spending was so outrageous,” the campaign source told The Daily Beast.
