Morning Dose of 'His Excellency' Weirdness
The saga continues.
Just to recap: Yesterday FBDC’s Matt Dornic brought you the wild tale of Nelson Lewis attempting to impersonate Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) and the subsequent video with Kate Michel over torturous high tea at The Mayflower Hotel in which Lewis claims to be His Excellency..to The Bahamas. Lewis worked at FNC as a booker and as a senior producer for the Laura Ingraham Show briefly until he was terminated. The Washington Examiner’s Scott McCabe broke the original story of Nelson’s arrest for being in possession of a congressional pin after claiming he had been assaulted but later admitted the assailants hadn’t touched him.
The story gets weirder still, as new details emerge.
Police phoned Kingston three weeks ago to inform him that Lewis had been trying to impersonate him. This surprised the congressman, but once he heard the details, he found it “logical” that the scared young man tried to use his name. Kingston, after all, hired Lewis four or five years ago as a summer intern, and considers him a longtime family friend.”He was a good intern,” Kingston said in an interview with FishbowlDC Thursday night.
The congressman explained that his friendship with the Lewis family dates back three generations in Savannah, Ga. The congressman knows his father, his grandfather — the Lewis family is known to be well-respected philanthropists in Georgia.
“My thinking is it’s one of those youthful indiscretions that just got out of hand,” Kingston reasoned. “It was a one-time event, harmless in intent. I’m friends with him. I don’t know the circumstance of this, but my impression is he’s out drinking one night, running his mouth, unfortunately the hole got a little bit deeper. There’s no ill intention.”
Police told Kingston that nothing would become of it, that they were going to slap Lewis on the wrist sort of thing. But according to McCabe’s story, the young man was arrested and faces charges that could land him six months in jail. This was news to Kingston.
The congressman largely gives Lewis the benefit of the doubt and plans to speak with him. “It breaks my heart and I will talk to him as Dutch uncle first chance I get,” he said, clear worry and concern in his voice.
Photo credit: Above is Lewis’s business card. The photograph was taken by New York Social Diary’s Carol Joynt, who wrote about Lewis on midterm election night when he introduced himself to her as the ambassador. He told her it was an old card.
