John E. Sununu keeps turning up next to men tied to sexual misconduct, and New Hampshire political observers are starting to notice.
In the span of a few months, the Republican US Senate candidate has posed for campaign photos with a former police officer whose file documented his misconduct with a 15-year-old, publicly praised an Oktoberfest hosted by a state senator once charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old, and watched old questions about his name in a released Jeffrey Epstein email resurface.
The pattern is not new. In 2002, Sununu accepted the endorsement of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, later branded a “serial child molester” by a federal judge.
This summer, Sununu celebrated the endorsement of a state lawmaker who opposed banning child marriage and called teenagers “ripe” and “fertile.”
Online and on the campaign trail, voters and opponents are tying the episodes together.
What happened this week?
On Wednesday, Sununu posted on X that he and his wife had attended an Oktoberfest hosted by state Sen. Howard Pearl, a Loudon Republican.
“Kitty and I enjoyed the great company, good food, and beautiful weather at Senator Howard Pearl’s Oktoberfest in Loudon,” he wrote.
Critics quickly resurfaced Pearl’s record.
In 2014, Pearl was charged with misdemeanor sexual assault over an incident at his home. According to the complaint, he placed his hand inside the underwear of a 15-year-old girl and fondled her. Pearl, then running for the state Senate, dropped out of that race and turned himself in.
The case never reached a verdict. A judge dismissed it in August 2015 after the defense argued prosecutors had turned over a recorded interview with the accuser too late, and a motion to reconsider was denied.
“I had my day in court and the charges were dismissed,” Pearl said.
The case did not keep Pearl out of office. He won a state House seat in 2016 and the state Senate District 17 seat in 2022, which he still holds.
Who is Jon Stone?
Weeks earlier, Sununu posed with Jon Stone at a Claremont gun shop, the same shop where Gov. Kelly Ayotte campaigned two years earlier.
Granite Post reported on Stone’s record. While serving as a police officer, he was investigated over his conduct with a 15-year-old girl. He threatened to rape his supervisor’s wife and children, to murder his supervisor, and made threats against other officers.
His personel file stayed private until a journalist obtained it under New Hampshire’s right-to-know law. In 2024, records revealed Stone had been fired in 2021 from a correctional officer job at the Southern State Correctional Facility after a pattern of racist, sexist and homophobic conduct toward colleagues, and that he had been disciplined repeatedly since 2013, including a demotion and a temporary suspension.
What about the Epstein files?
Sununu’s name also appears in the released Epstein files, in a single 2010 email, though what that shows is contested. The email, released by the Department of Justice, shows Epstein wrote “John Sununu, has good stories” when an associate, Boris Nikolic, asked whom he should meet at a World Economic Forum event in Doha, Qatar.
The Washington Post reported the mention is ambiguous, “without making clear whether Epstein was referring to the Senate candidate or his father,” and found no evidence either Sununu met or communicated with Epstein.
What is documented is that the younger Sununu denied on camera ever traveling to Doha, despite the fact he had. Asked “Have you ever been to Doha, Qatar?” he answered “No.”
His campaign then acknowledged that was not true.
Sununu visited Doha in 2001 with a congressional delegation and took part in a 2010 World Economic Forum event there.
His former Republican primary rival, Scott Brown, hammered the reversal, telling Newsmax, “he lied. He said he was never in Qatar… So the question is, why did he lie, and what else is he lying about?” Granite Post has reported on Democrats also demanding he come clean. Former US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last week that Sununu has never put the questions to rest.
Has this happened before?
When Sununu first ran for the Senate, Hastert, then the sitting House speaker, endorsed him and headlined a New Hampshire fundraiser that Sununu attended.
At the time, Hastert was one of the most powerful Republicans in the country, and the abuses he admitted to committing did not surface until more than a decade later.
In 2015, Hastert pleaded guilty in a hush-money case. At his 2016 sentencing, a judge described him as a “serial child molester” over the sexual abuse of teenage wrestlers he had coached decades earlier. He admitted to the abuse, though he was never convicted of any sex crimes.
In July 2026, Sununu accepted the endorsement of New Hampshire state Rep. Jess Edwards and celebrated it on X: “I’m proud to have your support.” Edwards is the lawmaker who, in 2024, voted against a bill to ban child marriage and argued the ban could push “people who are of ripe, fertile age” toward abortion.
How are people reacting?
The Jon Stone photo set off Reddit, where a thread on the state’s largest subreddit drew 327 upvotes, more than 60 comments and roughly 47,000 views. Readers did the same dot-connecting.
The top comment, with 134 upvotes, went through Stone’s record.
“Lets not undersell it,” wrote one user using the name flatpackjack. Open-Industry-8396 questioned whether the campaign had vetted Stone at all: “Jesus. fucking guy is a menace. Sununu must have done a check? if so, he sees this and says ‘that’s fine’ ??” Many turned the photo into a vote cue, from “Vote blue” to “No Sununus is good news.”
Others reached straight for Epstein and Hastert. “John Sununu? The same John Sununu that Jeffrey Epstein said ‘has great stories’?” one user wrote, before raising his Hastert connection.
A large share of the thread went further still, extending the accusation to Republicans broadly, which is the commenters’ opinion and not established fact.
“The party of pedos,” read one. “Birds of a feather,” wrote another.
The Sununu campaign did not respond to request for comment.
