Embattled North Carolina GOP Rep. Chuck Edwards pleaded to his colleagues in a letter Wednesday to consider the House Ethics' Committee's findings thoroughly before voting on whether to censure him. 

The committee found in a report that Edwards violated the “spirit” of the chamber’s rules against sexual harassment by engaging in inappropriate conduct with young female staffers and recommended he face formal censure from the House. 

The committee also noted that it found "no evidence that Representative Edwards engaged in sexual activity with or explicitly propositioned any individual under his employ,"

Edwards stated that none of his actions toward two young female staffers actually constituted sexual misconduct and characterized the interactions as an "affection friendship."

“An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition," Edwards said. "A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct. Socializing with a colleague is not sexual misconduct. Caring deeply about someone with whom you have worked and come to know for years is not sexual misconduct."

The defense comes after the Ethics Committee investigated claims of sexual misconduct by the lawmaker after he behaved inappropriately with the women, who the panel argued feared professional consequences if they rejected his advances.

The conduct included writing poems for a staffer and crying during a slideshow at her going away office party; telling a staffer he left early from an event because she brought a date; and paying for a singer to go to a staffer’s birthday party to sing Ed Sheeran’s Hills of Aberfeldy and saying it was “from a special someone.”

Edwards claimed that there are no House rules forbidding friendship between staff members and lawmakers, or forbidding them from spending social time together or "deeply caring about" people lawmakers spent years with.

"Those distinctions matter. Otherwise, perfectly permissible conduct can become evidence of wrongdoing simply by accumulating enough examples of it and assigning them an improper motive," he wrote. "Ten permissible acts do not become misconduct merely because they are placed together in ten paragraphs."

The lawmaker also said his relationship with the two women was more of a father-daughter relationship and was not sexual or romantic. He urged fellow lawmakers to consider why that characterization was omitted in the report.

The letter comes after Edwards suspended his reelection campaign in North Carolina over backlash from the report. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Misty Severi is a news reporter for Just The News. You can follow her on X for more coverage.