President-elect Donald Trump, a friend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein who a jury last year found liable for sexual abuse, is determined to install as the nation’s top law enforcement a man who himself stands credibly accused of statutory rape — so much so that he’s willing to potentially go to war with his own party if it chooses "ethics" and "family values" over raw political power.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., resigned last week after Trump nominated him to serve as attorney general. Although Gaetz has little in the way of legal experience, he is a partisan firebrand who excelled in his job interview by speaking in the blunt language of retribution, one Trump advisor told The Bulwark, as opposed to his theories of law and how precisely he’d manage the Department of Justice and its more than 115,000 employees.
“Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ f***in’ heads,’” the advisor recounted.
To his critics, Gaetz is a repellent sex criminal: a man in his 40s who attended drug-fueled parties as an elected Republican and had sex with a 17-year-old girl at one of them, according to a woman who testified before the House Ethics Committee. Gaetz has denied the allegations and a federal investigation into him ended without criminal charges.
His supporters, meanwhile, are not so much defending Gaetz, the man, as much as they are seeking to bury the evidence of any wrongdoing and force through his nomination in a demonstration of raw political power. The ethics panel was supposed to last week release the product of a months-long investigation into Gaetz and his alleged improprieties, but the lawmaker’s abrupt resignation complicated that: The committee only has jurisdiction over current members of Congress, a fact Trump-Gaetz allies are citing to justify keeping the report’s findings secret.
Presumably those findings do not exonerate Gaetz. According to a lawyer representing two women who testified about Gaetz, House investigators were told that witnesses could place the Florida Republican at as many as 10 “sex parties” during his first term in Congress, where illegal drugs were being used and at least on one occasion Gaetz was seen having sex with a 17-year-old girl, Politico reported Monday.
“I think that would be a terrible precedent to set,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has said, speaking not of an accused predator serving as attorney general but the House report on his activities being made public.
Gaetz’s fate will be determined in the Senate, however, not the House. There, at least, members of Trump’s own party are publicly insisting that they would like to do their job: to provide advice and consent regarding the president-elect’s cabinet picks.
Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., said he’d actually like to take a look at the ethics report on Gaetz.
“I believe the Senate should have access to that,” he said. “Now, should it be released to the public or not? I guess that will be part of the negotiations. But that should definitely be part of our decision-making.”
That echoes other members of the Senate GOP caucus, including Texas’ John Cornyn and South Dakota’s Mike Rounds, and it’s more spine than some Trump allies have shown. But it’s also a retreat from what Mullin was saying about Gaetz before he was nominated — in short, that he is an amoral pervert who would share videos of his sexual exploits on the House floor. While admitting he did not even know Gaetz had a law degree, Mullin on Sunday also reiterated his faith in the head of the Republican Party.
“You can see why he was successful in business, why he was successful in this campaign — because he surrounds himself with the right people,” Mullin said Sunday, adding: “I have no doubt hat President Trump believes that Matt Gaetz is the right person to do the right job.”
There is indeed no doubt about that. “Trump is dead serious about making him attorney general,” as Politico notes; it is not a feint, meant to precede a more palatable nominee just as committed to using the Justice Department to harass the president's enemies. And if his allies in the Senate try to thwart him, there’s always the House, where the Trump team believes that the speaker could assist them in bypassing the upper chamber, should it be necessary, and relying on recess appointments. Although the legal theory is untested, the argument is that Johnson could call for Congress to be adjourned; if the Senate fails to go along, Trump could then intervene and essentially force the legislative branch to go on vacation, allowing him to fill his cabinet while lawmakers are off in Cancun.
Johnson has shown no signs he will thwart Trump in any way, the conservative Christian instead deploying his moral authority to defend an alleged sexual predator.
“Look, Matt Gaetz is a colleague of mine,” the Louisiana Republican said on “Fox News Sunday,” appearing after he was photographed alongside Trump and his inner circle over the weekend. “He’s one of the brightest minds in Washington or anywhere for that matter,” Johnson continued, describing the opposition to Gaetz as based on the fact that he’s a “reformer.
“I think that’s why the establishment in Washington is so shaken up about this pick,” Johnson said.
That — forcing Republicans to pick a side; making them describe a total cad as a legal genius if they wish to stay in the good graces of power — is at least part of what’s at play here. Trump, narrowly winning the popular vote for the first time, insists he has a mandate to do as he pleases and is daring his own party to object.
As former DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich told The Guardian, Gaetz is certainly a choice.
“In a world where there are plenty of lawyers willing to do Trump’s bidding, he chooses the candidate who has so much baggage,” Bromwich said. “He’s testing his strength and if anyone in his party has the backbone to oppose him.”
