The fact that former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz lacks relevant legal experience should be enough to kill his nomination as attorney general. The poor judgment he has repeatedly demonstrated, including pointless stunts and intraparty squabbles that irritated his Republican colleagues, only lengthens the odds of his confirmation. But the clincher may end up being the salacious details of a House Ethics Committee report that Gaetz would like to keep under wraps.
The committee reportedly looked into several possible ethical violations by Gaetz, including allegations that he had sex with an underage girl, used illegal drugs, accepted prohibited gifts, misappropriated campaign funds, and shared sexually explicit videos with his colleagues on the House floor. The New York Times describes the resulting report as "highly critical."
Because Gaetz gave up his seat after President-elect Donald Trump announced his nomination, the House Ethics Committee no longer has any jurisdiction over him. As House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) sees it, that should be the end of the matter. "I'm going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report, because that is not the way we do things in the House," Johnson said last Friday, adding that releasing the report "would be a terrible precedent to set."
Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas), who sits on the committee that will consider Gaetz's nomination, sees things differently. "We need to have a complete vetting of the nominees, not only so we know that the nominee is qualified, but also to protect the president," Cornyn said last week. "I'm sure it's not in [Trump's] best interest to have any surprises in the House Ethics Committee report."
What sort of surprises? On Monday, the Times reports, "an unidentified hacker" gained access to a confidential file that "is said to include sworn testimony by a woman who said that she had sex with Mr. Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17, as well as corroborating testimony by a second woman who said that she witnessed the encounter." The file was produced in connection with a defamation lawsuit that Gaetz's friend Christopher Dorworth, a Florida businessman, filed against "both the woman who says she had sex with Mr. Gaetz when she was a minor and Joel Greenberg, an erstwhile ally of Mr. Gaetz who is serving an 11-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to federal sex trafficking charges involving the woman."
Another Times report notes that Joel Leppard, "a lawyer representing two women who testified that [Gaetz] paid them for sex," told ABC News one of his clients "was walking out to the pool area" during a July 2017 "house party" in Florida when "she looked to her right" and saw Gaetz "having sex with her friend, who was 17." According to Leppard, "both women also told the [ethics] committee that they were paid for sex using Venmo." The Times says Leppard told CNN that Gaetz "later discovered the girl was underage"—a detail that would not mitigate his criminal liability under Florida law and probably will not carry much weight with the senators considering his nomination.
In 2022, federal prosecutors decided not to pursue criminal charges against Gaetz after looking into claims involving that alleged encounter and transportation of women paid for sex. The main reason, The Washington Post reported, was that prosecutors had doubts about the credibility of the witnesses on which they would have to rely. While that assessment helped Gaetz avoid prosecution, senators who have qualms about his nomination will be applying a lower standard than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and they are apt to consider the women's testimony relevant, especially if the House Ethics Committee deemed it credible.
The age of consent in Florida is 18, although it is lower in many other states. Even according to Gaetz's accusers, he did not initially know the 17-year-old's age, and libertarians typically would argue that his sexual encounters with adults, provided they were consensual, are no one else's business, whether or not money changed hands. But Gaetz has always insisted that he never paid anyone for sex, so evidence to the contrary obviously does not reflect well on the honesty or reliability of the man whom Trump wants to appoint as the nation's chief law enforcement officer.
Senators are also likely to look askance at the juvenile behavior reported by Gaetz's former colleagues in the House. "There's a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him" against the ethics charges, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R–Okla.), who served with Gaetz in the House, told CNN last year. "We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor that all of us had walked away [from], of the girls that he had slept with….He bragged about how he would crush E.D. medicine and chase it with energy drinks so he could go all night." Mullin, like Cornyn and other Republican senators, thinks "the Senate should have access" to the House Ethics Committee's report.
Trump, of course, picked Gaetz despite the widely publicized sexual allegations, despite the other claims of ethical violations, despite his reputation in the House, and despite his scant legal experience. One plausible explanation is that Trump values personal loyalty above all other considerations, especially when it might help him deliver on his often expressed threats to punish his political opponents.
"Matt Gaetz has 3 critical assets that are needed for the AG role: a big brain, a spine of steel and an axe to grind," billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, Trump's richest and bounciest supporter, wrote in an X post early Tuesday morning. "He is the Judge Dredd America needs to clean up a corrupt system and put powerful bad actors in prison. Gaetz will be our Hammer of Justice."
According to two other takes on Trump's motivation, he picked a manifestly unqualified candidate for attorney general precisely because of his liabilities. In one version of that theory, Trump is trying to set a precedent of complete obeisance to his will by daring Republican senators to defy him. In the other version, Trump knows Gaetz won't be confirmed but hopes the nomination will make his other picks, including a Fox News host as secretary of defense and an anti-vaxxer as secretary of health and human services, seem decent by comparison.
Gaetz, in short, is either Trump's Hammer of Justice, Caligula's horse, or a sacrificial lamb. We may eventually find out which, but not until we have learned more about his sex life than we ever really wanted.
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