Politics

Consultant for RFK Jr. attacked Black ally of Trump in homophobic post

A campaign consultant focused on minority voter outreach for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

By Neil Vigdor, New York Times Service

April 15, 2024

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A campaign consultant focused on minority voter outreach for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used homophobic language last week on social media to attack the founder of a Black conservative group who is backing former President Donald Trump, according to a screenshot of the now-deleted post.

Angela Stanton-King, whose photo appears on the campaign website of Kennedy, the independent presidential candidate, targeted Diante Johnson, the founder and president of the Black Conservative Federation, in the post Wednesday on the social platform X.

She referred to Johnson as an “open flaming Feminine closet gay” in the post. On Saturday, The New York Times obtained a screenshot of the post, which was first reported by Politico.

“How is he gonna lead heterosexual black men to the Republican Party?” she wrote in a caption.

Reached by phone Sunday, Stanton-King asked how a reporter for the Times got her number and then hung up.

Stanton-King, whom Trump pardoned for her role in a car-theft ring, ran as a Republican and lost her race for a U.S. House seat in Georgia during the 2020 election.

Kennedy’s campaign did not immediately comment.

It was the second time in less than a week that a political consultant for Kennedy had put the campaign in the position of having to defuse a potential political land mine.

Last week, video emerged of Rita Palma, a ballot access consultant, calling President Joe Biden the “mutual enemy” of Trump and Kennedy’s supporters. She posted on X that she had attended two “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election, including the one on Jan. 6, 2021, that escalated with the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

In the video, Palma discussed a hypothetical scenario in which Kennedy peeled away enough votes in the November election so that neither of the two major-party candidates — Biden or Trump — could reach 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win the presidency.

Each state delegation in the U.S. House would then get one vote to decide the presidency, she said, potentially helping Republicans to tip the election toward Trump.

Kennedy’s campaign fired Palma in the face of criticism over her remarks, which CNN first reported and were confirmed by the Times.

Johnson, the target of Stanton-King’s attack, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In February, Trump headlined a gala hosted by the Black Conservative Federation in Columbia, South Carolina, telling the group that he believed that the four criminal cases he is facing have earned him support from Black voters because they saw the historic unfairness of the justice system reflected in his legal woes.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stanton-King, a former reality television star and an author, was convicted in 2004 on a federal conspiracy charge stemming from her role in a car-theft ring. She received a pardon from Trump in 2020 after serving two years in prison and six months of home confinement.

One month after being pardoned, she announced that she would run against John Lewis, the civil rights leader and longtime Georgia member of Congress. He died a few months later.

In that race, Stanton-King drew scrutiny after she repeatedly posted QAnon content and obscure hashtags, such as “#trusttheplan.” They were later removed from social media.

So was another online post in which Stanton-King compared the LGBTQ+ movement to “pedophilia.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.