Skip to Main Content
Politics
A campaign consultant focused on minority voter outreach for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
From left, Black Conservative Federation Founder and President Diante Johnson, former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, and Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., stand on stage before Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the Black Conservative Federation’s Annual BCF Honors Gala at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center in Columbia, S.C., Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
By Neil Vigdor, New York Times Service
April 15, 2024 | 8:28 AM
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,