Louisiana House candidate accused of rape says he hopes to again ‘earn’ Trump endorsement

A congressional candidate from Louisiana who was the subject of a police report accusing him of rape – which he denies – says he is hoping to again “earn” Donald Trump’s endorsement as he considers precisely where to run amid redistricting.The candidate, Blake Miguez, is weighing running in one of two districts, neither of which he lives in but in which he is allowed to run. He has been mulling that choice after the supreme court’s landmark decision in Louisiana" class="entity-link entity-event" data-entity-id="170396" data-entity-type="event">Callais v Louisiana prompted the state to swiftly redraw its US House districts – and after he had secured the president’s backing under the previous congressional map.Approached on Wednesday after Miguez’s campaign website had become password protected and otherwise blank, a spokesperson said: “Blake was honored to have President Trump’s endorsement for [an] old … congressional district that no longer exists” after Callais, “and [he] hopes to earn it again after he announces a campaign under the new district lines.”A White House spokesperson clarified that Trump did not formally rescind his endorsement – but added that the president “will look at the candidate field after candidate [qualifying] if necessary”.“At this point, [Trump] has not made any changes nor does he have an intent to,” the spokesperson said. “If new information changes things, we will cross that bridge when we get to it.”The Republican Louisiana state senator secured the coveted backing of Trump in the race for a US House seat as he qualified to run in a 16 May primary for the post, which is safely held by their party. But that primary was postponed until the November midterms after the Callais decision.Miguez’s campaign has also had to grapple with an Atlantic report that he had not disclosed to Trump’s team the existence of a 2007 rape accusation reported to local law enforcement on the same day of the alleged assault.That police report – which The Guardian also independently obtained and reported on – never resulted in charges, and Miguez categorically denied the claim as false. But it reportedly raised concerns within the White House that Miguez “either wasn’t fully vetted or wasn’t forthcoming about discoverable documents from his past” while he successfully pursued Trump’s endorsement, as The Atlantic reported.The statements from Miguez’s campaign and the White House sparked verbal sparring from one of the candidate’s Republican rivals.Lionel Rainey, a spokesperson for a political action committee supporting another candidate in the postponed US House race, Rick Edmonds, said he found it “silly” to blame redistricting for evident uncertainty over Trump’s endorsement.“Nobody believes that,” Rainey said.Separate 12 March articles from The Guardian and The Atlantic reported on a woman who alleged being raped by Miguez in late August 2007 when he purportedly was her “live-in ex boyfriend”.A police report quoted the woman as saying the assault took place at the end of a night of drinking in Miguez’s home town of Erath, Louisiana. But the legal document said she did not want to press charges against Miguez – then in law school – because she did not want to get him into trouble.One of the ways the Miguez campaign responded to those claims was to link to an article from a Louisiana news outlet that followed up on The Atlantic and The Guardian’s reporting with quotes from family members of the accuser. Those family members questioned the accuser’s credibility while citing mental health and substance abuse problems.The campaign, meanwhile, also circulated an email attributed to her father that was sent to the state senator’s office which read in part: “Everything my daughter has reported about you were lies and she is a liar and has a drug problem.”The Guardian subsequently wrote to the woman offering her the opportunity to address her family member’s statements. She did not reply.In the months since the Miguez accuser’s claims, US House representatives Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales – a California Democrat and a Texas Republican, respectively – resigned under bipartisan pressure over allegations of sexual misconduct against both.Furthermore, on 10 July, the Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner of Maine withdrew his scandal-laden candidacy days after detailed sexual assault allegations were made against him.Miguez won election to Louisiana’s state senate in 2023 after more than eight years in its house of representatives. He signed up to contest for a seat that congresswoman Julia Letlow vacated when, with Trump’s backing, she victoriously ran in a Republican US Senate primary at the expense of incumbent Bill Cassidy.The boundaries of that seat – in Louisiana’s fifth congressional district – were outside Miguez’s Erath home when Trump endorsed him in February as a “warrior” of the president’s Maga movement. Miguez’s opponents seized on that to try to cast him as a political opportunist, and his campaign countered that he has also long kept a home as well as operated a business in the fifth district, which then included Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s capital, as the state’s Shreveport Times reported.Under the state’s post-Callais congressional map, Erath is still outside Louisiana’s fifth congressional district. The town is in Louisiana’s third district, which since 2017 has been represented by the Republican Clay Higgins.But the new sixth congressional district contains the Baton Rouge capital region. And on Thursday, the sixth district incumbent – the Democrat Cleo Fields – said that he would not seek re-election under the altered boundaries of the post-Callais map.The Times reported in June that Miguez opponents had sources telling them that he had asked Trump to let him carry the president’s fifth district endorsement over to the sixth.US House candidates are not required to run in their home districts. They only need to live in the same state as the congressional district in which they are running.Miguez’s campaign on Wednesday declined to say which Louisiana congressional district he may target when a three-day qualifying period opens on 5 August.