This is an article about Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominee who faces accusations of sexual misconduct. No, not Pete Hegseth, the pick to lead the Department of Defense who a woman accuses of raping her at a conference in 2017; no, not Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the serial adulterer whose former live-in nanny says she was groped by the anti-vaccine activist; and no, not Linda McMahon, the former WWE executive accused, per CNN, of knowingly allowing an employee “to use his position as ringside announce to sexually exploit children.”
No, this is an article about Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general who stands accused of having sex with a minor at drug-fueled parties while serving as a member of the U.S. Congress. The evidence against Gaetz made public so far is mounting: multiple women have now come forward to claim not only that the former Florida lawmaker paid them for sex, but that they personally witnessed him having sex with a 17-year-old girl. Venmo transactions show he paid those women thousands of dollars, and wrote one a check for “tuition reimbursement”; Gaetz also reimbursed them over PayPal, relying on an account registered to Nestor Galban, a man who he claimed in 2020 was his “adopted son” (that claim came days after Gaetz’s friend, Joel Greenberg, was arrested on charges including child sex trafficking).
What else could be in the House Ethics Committee’s report on Gaetz is anyone’s guess. On Wednesday, the panel’s Republican majority blocked a Democratic effort to make its findings public, a move that came after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., threatened to reveal which of her GOP colleagues had also been accused of sexual wrongdoing and which had relied on taxpayer money to pay off their accusers (an admission of her own complicity, really).
“I would hope that if you are at home and you are a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, that you would want to see the information on the nominee to become your attorney general or any other member of the Cabinet,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said after the committee’s Republicans voted to cover for their former colleague. It’s “not a good sign,” she added, that the GOP does not want it released; it certainly does not suggest the report is exonerating.
It’s not a great sign for Democratic resistance, either, that not all Democrats agree. “This committee will become partisan if we vote to release a report on any member,” Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., told Politico, which described the lawmaker as being “friendly with Gaetz.”
What, though, is there left to say a man who has already been credibly and publicly accused of sex crimes while being nominated by a man from whom he previously sought a pardon for sex trafficking?
Republicans in the Senate, who have access to the same information as any member of the public, have already signaled that nothing they have learned so far is worth blocking an appointment over.
“He wasn’t prosecuted for having sex with an underage girl,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Wednesday. “That tells me something.”
But Graham also warned that the confirmation hearings could be a spectacle that Trump may wish to avoid, even as he threatens to bypass the Senate altogether if he doesn’t get his way (his allies may not wish to test that proposition, however questionable the legal theory).
Still, how much of a concern is a few days of a “bad look” in a post-“Access Hollywood” tape world? The president-elect was found liable by a jury for sexual assault and was just this year convicted of fraud over hush payments he made to a porn star. Just over two weeks ago, he won an election.
Indeed, while The New York Times reported that Trump himself is seemingly open to considering alternative candidates for attorney general if Gaetz goes down, he also deployed Vice President-elect J.D. Vance on Wednesday to make the case for his first choice.
According to Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, the pitch is that the allegations against Gaetz were already investigated and he was never charged with a crime, whether there’s enough evidence to convince a jury conflated with actual innocence. Speaking with GOP senators on Wednesday, Gaetz talked about “the unfairness and the lack of truth of the allegations being pursued by the committee, and the fact that the DOJ did decline to prosecute,” Lee told reporters.
That is part of the appeal here: Gaetz, like Trump, can claim he’s a victim of a Biden-run defamation campaign. Who better to weaponize the Department of Justice and pursue Trump’s vows of “retribution” than someone who has experienced that themselves?
Lawrence Jones, a co-host of “Fox & Friends,” made that argument Thursday morning, noting that Trump was well aware that Gaetz had been investigated for sex trafficking and sleeping with a minor. It didn’t bother him, Jones said; in fact, it was an asset.
Trump, he said, “was aware of this investigation before. And the position of the former president is that there’s a Department of Justice that went after me, and it was unfair, and they didn't find anything with me. And the same thing with Matt Gaetz. He’s actually doubled down. He wants him to be the person.”
If Gaetz makes it to confirmation hearings next year, it’s certainly possible that members of Trump’s party decide they just can’t do it (that many Republicans loathe Gaetz, as a man, is no secret); perhaps, even before then, Trump will abandon his ally for the likes of Ken Paxton, Texas’ far-right attorney general and, as far as we know, a guy who merely cheated on his wife. But the rationalizations are already out there for public consumption — Gaetz was never charged; women lie — so no one should be surprised if Republican senators ultimately decide that their moral objections should, like the House ethics report, remain private.
