Yesterday the NY Times reported, cluelessly, that if McCarthy falters today, there are 4 likely possibilities for speaker: Scalise (reasonable), Gym Jordan (that’s the plan), Elise Stefanik (laughable and absurd and no chance whatsoever, since, regardless of The Times calling her a MAGA warrior, many of her MAGA colleagues consider her an opportunist and don’t trust her)… and, most idiotic of all… Patrick McHenry, who Catie Edmonson called “the dark horse.” She wrote that “McHenry came to Congress in 2005 at the age of 29 as a conservative rabble-rouser, and was frequently seen yelling on the House floor or on cable news shows.” Better yet, he noisily pledged to set the standard for right-wing extremism and said no one would ever get to his right.
“But,” wrote Edmonson, “in the years that followed, the silver-haired, bow tie-wearing McHenry underwent a metamorphosis. He became chief deputy whip to then-Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, who later predicted that the North Carolina Republican would become speaker himself one day. He pointedly took a lower-profile, behind-the-scenes approach to the job. And he developed a reputation among other lawmakers for his braininess and interest in tax and financial policy.” He’s one of the most crooked members of Congress and sits on the House Financial Services Committee taking bribes and doing everything the banksters tell him to do. That passes for “braininess and interest in tax and financial policy” in the GOP— and the NY Times. McHenry, who has for years been an informal adviser to McCarthy, has previously tried to scuttle the notion that he was interested in any top leadership post, saying he would rather chair the Financial Services Committee. He once gave the Republican leader a silver bowl in a joking reference to a famous scene from the crime drama series The Wire, in which a former mayor tells an incoming one that the vaunted top job is akin to eating silver bowls of feces all day.”
And yet, he spent $2,000,000 out of his hard-earned bribe money to buy the GOP whip job. So why didn’t he get it? A notorious closet queen— see below— he was the one who tried to get his neighbor, Madison Cawthorn, into bed and to an orgy. Cawthorn ratted him out to McCarthy and Scalise and that’s when he was no longer on the list for the whip job, which went to Sam Bankman-Fried-owned Tom Emmer instead, the author of the letter to Gary Gensler from the Blockchain-8 telling him he couldn’t regulate crypto firms like FTX.
The Times nonsense about McHenry included the silliness about him being “the only Republican lawmaker whose name has been floated as a possible candidate for speaker who voted to certify the 2020 presidential election,” without mentioning that the only one floating McHenry’s name is his own p.r. person. Since I’ve been following McHenry’s career closely for over two decades— when he ran NotHillary.com for Rick Lazio— let recap a bit.
We don’t have to go all the way back to the 2000 Lazio-Clinton NY Senate race though. McHenry started in politics working as a sleazy operative for Karl Rove in 2000 and it's been all downhill ever since. He only won the GOP congressional primary by using out of state college students, at least one of whom he was having a homosexual relationship with, some of whom voted in the primary illegally. After winning that first primary amid a voter fraud scandal there was the little matter of insulting American fighting men in Iraq and taking bribes from Countrywide in the midst of the mortgage scandal to help them cover-up their criminal activities. He's generally considered one of Congress' most corrupt and untrustworthy characters-- and that's saying a lot!
But, let’s start with this post from 2007. Short version: McHenry was the key figure in a still unsolved murderous Republican homosexual love triangle/escort service. The murdered gay Republicans included Ralph Reed's purported ex-lover, Ralph Gonzalez (former head of the rabidly homophobic Georgia Republican Party), GOP lobbyist David Abrami and McHenry guy-pal Robert Drake, the shooter. All three were found in a murder-suicide in an Orlando apartment. According to right-wing website, the North Carolina Conservative "All three men were active in Republican politics." They mention that Drake is "an associate" of McHenry's but don't define that. He is alleged to be an associate of quite a few younger men, some of whom are gay and some of whom are just gay-for-pay. (Note: The websites in this GOP report are graphic, pornographic gay prostitute sites and if you don't want to see that kind of stuff DO NOT copy and paste the links. They are purposely not in the form of links.) Gonzalez owned the apartment and then GOP consulting firm, Stratagem Group. Abrami lived with him. McHenry’s boyfriend, Drake was also associated with a gay escort service in the Virginia Beach area. The owners of that escort service were facing charges that they murdered the owner of a rival company catering to the gay community. CrimeBlog.us reported “Drake was trying to hit Gonzalez up for cash to raise money to defend a kid (Harlow Cuadra) who is on trial for murder up in Pennsylvania. The 26 year old ‘kid’ ran a gay escort and porn business in Virginia Beach and may have had several Republican clients— Drake being one. (See www.norfolkmaleescorts.com and www.boybatter.com)… My sources say Drake may have approached Gonzalez for funds for Cuadra’s defense, threatening to blow the lid off everything by MAKING THE REPUBLICAN CLIENT LIST OF THE GAY ESCORT BUSINESS PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE.”
News outlets at the time only noted that Drake was “an associate” of McHenry’s, not his lover, and never defined what kind of an associate. Nor did they mention that McHenry was both a client of and a silent partner in the gay escort service in Virginia Beach and that his partners had murdered (stabbed, presumably by Drake, 28 times and then set on fire) business rival Bryan Kocis. In 2007, when I called McHenry's congressional office, the guy who answered the phone confirmed that Drake "worked" there but said he didn't know what his duties were. When I asked to speak to the congressman or someone who would know, he put me on hold, then came back, audibly upset, and said he was mistaken and that he didn't know anything and no one else was in the office and then quickly hung up on me. The murder was completely covered up by the Orlando police department and everything about it pretty much disappeared.
In 2007, a Republican newspaper publisher, Ken Fortenberry, was running against McHenry in the GOP primary. He showed up at a McHenry town hall in Gaston County where McHenry refused to engage with him on any campaign-related questions. Eventually, the frustrated Fortenberry whipped out a large photo of Drake-- the one above-- and asked a startled McHenry if he could deny any knowledge of the murdered ex-Marine. McHenry, looking like a rainbow flag, stammered and stuttered, said nothing intelligible and the meeting came to a screeching halt.
McHenry’s original calling card was a boast about how he was Congress’ youngest member— as if that supplants integrity, experience, intelligence, honesty or any other desirable trait. Since McHenry pulled that off, we’ve had a series of godawful members of Congress follow suit— Aaron Shock, Elise Stefanik, Madison Cawthorn and now Maxwell Frost, all among the worst— if not the worst— members of Congress elected in their classes.
And for those who have forgotten, this is from 2011, before Elizabeth Warren had been elected to the Senate and when McHenry was chair on a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee and demonstrated that braininess The Times was lauding yesterday: