It seems like a bad sign for former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and a commentary on where the country is right now, that media reports about him paying for sex must emphasize that the recipient was not a literal child.
In a story published Monday night, NBC News reported that Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer, “paid an adult woman for sex in 2017,” according to the woman’s attorney. At a drug-fueled party in Orlando, the woman — who was 19 — said she was “taken upstairs to have sex” with Gaetz within minutes of her arrival; later, according to her lawyer, she witnessed Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was just 17.
Joel Leppard, the attorney, also represents another woman who told congressional investigators that Gaetz paid her for sex at parties that were apparently a regular thing during his stint in Congress, which ended in his resignation last week and forced the House Ethics Committee to shelve a report on all the allegations against the former Florida lawmaker. Gaetz was also investigated for sex trafficking by the Department of Justice, which declined to pursue charges. He has denied any wrongdoing.
According to Leppard, however, there are receipts: Not only did Gaetz pay for sex on his Venmo account, the attorney claims, he also used a PayPal account registered to Nestor Galban; in a 2020 post on social media, Gaetz announced that Galban was “my son,” claiming he had adopted the then-19-year-old Cuban immigrant and raised him for the past six years. Days later, federal agents arrested Gaetz’s friend, former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg; Greenberg, who told investigators that he too witnessed Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old girl, pleaded guilty to underage sex trafficking and in December 2022 was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
In 2021, The Daily Beast reported that Gaetz’s Venmo account revealed payments to Greenberg, who in turn made payments to sex workers, including the 17-year-old. The transactions were described by Gaetz as being for “Tuition” and “School.”
“Regardless of how many times he tries to distract from the truth, the public deserves to know that what we all experienced was real and actually happened,” one of the women Gaetz allegedly paid said in a statement shared by her attorney.
In the past, nominees to serve in a president’s Cabinet have been derailed by far less than allegations that they are a pedophile who pays women for sex while serving in Congress as a member of the family-values party. According to Politico, there are indeed “[n]early a dozen” Republican senators who at this point “won’t commit” to confirming Gaetz.
“He’s got an uphill climb,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told the outlet.
Trump himself has now admitted that Gaetz now has “less than even odds” of being confirmed in the Senate, The New York Times reported Monday night. Even so, the 78-year-old is “making calls” on Gaetz’s behalf and reassuring himself that, even if doesn’t get his first choice as attorney general, “the standard for an acceptable candidate will have shifted so much that the Senate may simply approve his other nominees.”
But if the Senate GOP caucus does grow a spine, Trump settling for someone else is not his only option: There is also what The New Republic’s Greg Sargent describes as the “nuclear scenario”: Trump, working in concert with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., trying to force the Senate to go on recess, allowing him to bypass the confirmation process and load up his Cabinet with whomever he likes.
That scenario, which is reportedly being considered by Trump and his inner circle, is not without its own issues. Sarah Binder, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution, told Sargent that the Senate could push back and quickly call itself back into session and force a standoff with the new administration.
Republican senators could also decide that Trump and his “mandate” entitles him to a Cabinet of his choosing, in his manner of choosing it — or that insisting on their constitutional duty is not worth the grief that would come from the president blaming them for derailing his second term.
“It’s certainly a plausible outcome,” Binder said. “We’re on the unchartered path here. I don’t want to call it choose your own adventure — choose your own constitutional adventure — but it’s entirely possible that a Senate majority would give into that [and] avoid having to take controversial votes if they didn’t want to on those nominations through the nomination process, especially knowing that they could be recess appointed anyway.”
That would be a pathetic display of subservience from a co-equal branch of government. It would also be in keeping with the modern GOP, which over the past decade has been transformed into a vehicle for Trump and his personal brand of right-wing authoritarianism.
“Constitutional provisions don’t just leap into action,” Binder noted. “Lawmakers have to rise to the challenge and make a choice.”
When Trump lost the 2020 election and encouraged a mob of his supporters to block the peaceful transfer of power, most Republican senators — even those who forcefully condemned the attack on the U.S. Capitol — elected to move on, refusing to convict their party’s leader for trying to upend the constitutional order. That is no guarantee they will go along with whatever he says going forward, but it is something to recall when encountering notes of defiance in 2024.
