WASHINGTON DC – Even by this town’s tawdry standards, the House of Representatives’ Ethics Committee report into former Congressman Matt Gaetz is a shocker.
The 42-year old stands accused of what the New York Times called “an array of illegal and untoward conduct”, behaviour that could yet result in criminal charges and further derail his already tarnished career.
Reading the 37-page report, it’s understandable that Gaetz was trying to prevent it from going public, even as his former colleagues on Capitol Hill decided to release the devastating results of their years long investigation.
It is now clear that when Gaetz was nominated by president-elect Donald Trump for the post of Attorney General, many of his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill already knew the scale of his alleged misconduct.
Among the report’s lurid revelations, Gaetz is accused of spending tens of thousands of dollars on sex and drugs, of engaging in sexual activity with a 17-year old underage girl at a 2017 party and paying her $400, a sum that “she understood to be payment for sex”.
The report claims that between 2017 and 2020 Gaetz made payments in excess of $90,000 to a dozen different women, and used illegal drugs including cocaine and ecstasy on multiple occasions.
It also alleges that he used his position to claim falsely that one of his sexual partners was a Florida constituent in need of assistance to obtain a new passport.
Gaetz denies any laws were broken, claiming that during his 30s he was “working very hard, and playing hard too”.
He insists his conduct was not criminal, but on social media last week, he wrote that “I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have”.
It will now fall to the Department of Justice – ironically, the very government department that Trump wanted him to lead – to determine whether a fresh federal investigation of his conduct is warranted.
In February 2023, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against him, reportedly concluding that any case was not sufficiently strong to stand up in court. Whether the House report changes anything in that regard is unclear.
But what rings clear as a bell is that Gaetz should never, ever have been chosen by Trump as a possible future Attorney General.
Given what the president-elect’s fellow Republicans already knew, it is astonishing that Trump pressed ahead with the appointment, leaving it to Gaetz to drop out of the process only after the nominee visited Republicans in Congress and learned the scale of their opposition to him.
The entire selection of Gaetz is still shrouded in a degree of mystery. Trump’s transition co-chair, Susie Wiles, who will become White House Chief of Staff in January, was reportedly blindsided by the announcement.
Gaetz previously said the controversy over his potential nomination ‘was unfairly becoming a distraction’ to the work of the incoming administration (Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)She made it known that she was not in Trump’s suite aboard his plane when Gaetz offered to become his pliant Attorney General, and only learned of the selection when Trump announced it in a statement to the press.
Trump’s eagerness to strip the Department of Justice of its traditional (but not constitutionally enshrined) independence may have been at the root of his willingness to embrace Gaetz.
Trump also views Gaetz as a victim of “lawfare”, the weaponisation of America’s criminal justice system that the president-elect blames for his own legal travails.
But the report makes it clear that Republicans knew the extent of Gaetz’s alleged misconduct in late November when they voted not to release the Ethics Committee report publicly.
Days later, some of them had a rethink, supporting a successful secret vote – only reported this week – that led to the report’s ultimate publication.
At the very least, everyone involved in the process would have been aware that Gaetz would be at the risk of blackmail in the event that he ever rose to the position of Attorney General.
It is a measure of how far America has drifted from its traditional moorings that Gaetz continues to prepare for the launch of his eponymous television show in the New Year, despite the report’s contents.
One America News Network, a pro-Trump, far-right network is still planning to go ahead with “The Matt Gaetz Show” every weeknight in primetime. Unless, of course, he’s arrested by then.
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