Madison Cawthorn will remember April 26 as the tipping point, when all of his screw ups finally built to a crescendo and then an avalanche. This morning it was revealed that Cawthorn once again brought a gun into an airport, a 9mm handgun. Then, this afternoon, a story broke in the Washington Examiner that Cawthorn was implicated in an insider trading scheme, of the bitcoin Let’s Go Brandon.
Multiple watchdog groups told the Washington Examiner that Cawthorn’s Dec. 29 Instagram post suggests the lawmaker may have had advanced nonpublic knowledge of LGBCoin’s deal with [NASCAR driver Brandon] Brown. The watchdogs said the post, combined with Cawthorn’s statement that he owns LGBCoin, warrants an investigation from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine whether the lawmaker violated federal insider trading laws.
“This looks really, really bad,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the government affairs manager for Project on Government Oversight, a federal watchdog group. “This does look like a classic case of you got some insider information and acting on that information. And that’s illegal.”
“I think there’s probably a strong case here,” Hedtler-Gaudette added. “I don’t want to prejudge, but based on everything that’s out there, I think there is a very strong possibility that if someone is going to investigate this, they’re going to find something.” […]
Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, said if Cawthorn purchased LGBCoin before Dec. 30 with nonpublic knowledge of the cryptocurrency’s pending deal with Brown, that would constitute insider trading, a federal crime that can involve prison time.
Immediately following Brown’s Dec. 30 announcement, the value of all LGBCoin in circulation eclipsed $570 million. By the end of January, the market cap of the meme coin dropped to $0.
Koutoulas said in a Feb. 20 livestream that two factors led to LGBCoin’s precipitous decline: First, NASCAR rejected LGBCoin’s sponsorship deal with Brown on Jan. 4, and then later that month, unidentified insiders that owned an outsize share of the coin dumped all their holdings at once, causing the coin’s market value to evaporate.
Cawthorn is a lawbreaker, not a lawmaker. He is a disgrace to his state and to the House of Representatives.
Ignorance of the law is no defense, so even if Cawthorn was so stupid as to not know what he was doing, that won’t save him. As to the other issues, the repeated gun offenses, the repeated driving citations, he thinks he’s above the law.
He needs to go. North Carolina, you deserve better.
LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!
But his emails!!!!
If Martha Stewart can “jail”,so can Maddie!