Chuck Edwards

The House Ethics Committee concluded in a damning report on Monday that there was “substantial reason to believe” that Representative Chuck Edwards, Republican of North Carolina, “violated House rules related to sexual harassment and hostile workplaces.” Specifically, the report found that Mr. Edwards “engaged in persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct towards two young female staffers.”

The committee recommended that Mr. Edwards be censured by the House. According to the report, Mr. Edwards was interviewed by the committee and said that he had not done anything inappropriate. A spokeswoman for Mr. Edwards, 65, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report, which did not name the women, found that they both received numerous gifts from Mr. Edwards, including jewelry totaling more than $1,000 in value, designer purses, guns, shoes, flowers, a laptop and a cellphone, a KitchenAid mixer, a robotic vacuum, vacations, tickets to performances and one-on-one dinners.

Axios previously reported that the congressman gave the two women matching handguns, one pink and the other blue. The attorney for one of the women said that she legally disposed of her handgun and later rebuffed her boss’s offer of other gifts.

The report described how Mr. Edwards would make flattering comments about the appearance of the two female staffers, calling them “pretty” or “breathtaking.” Axios also reported that Mr. Edwards wrote a handwritten note to one of the women after she resigned, saying that she had “written a complex chapter in my heart.”

The report found that Mr. Edwards also wrote her poems, did yardwork at her house, paid for her massages at a spa and skipped votes in the House so that he could help decorate her Christmas tree. When she told Mr. Edwards that she had received another job offer, he replied in a text: “I don’t cry often, but I have today. It caught me off guard.” The woman did not respond to a request for comment.

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