The scandal-plagued former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz reportedly told senators skeptical of his suitability to be attorney general that he would not seek retribution against Donald Trump’s enemies – in his first week on the job, at least.
“Look, I’m not going to go there and indict [the former Wyoming congresswoman] Liz Cheney, have storm troopers bust through the studio door at MSNBC, and arrest [the retired public health official] Anthony Fauci in my first week,” Gaetz told senators, according to the Bulwark, a never-Trump conservative site.
Some senators, the Bulwark said, detected an “ominous disclaimer”. The site also said Gaetz added that he wanted to “break the cycle of weaponizing” the Department of Justice – a reference to Republican claims that federal charges against Trump over election subversion and retention of classified information were politically driven.
Meeting senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz was accompanied by JD Vance, the vice-president-elect and junior senator from Ohio. Confirmation hearings for Gaetz would be expected in the new year. Attention is therefore focused on Republicans who might be less vulnerable than most to threats from Trump, and thereby might seek to block Gaetz either before or during hearings. Chief among them are Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, relative moderates, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former leader heading for retirement and widely seen as an institutionalist at least to a degree disdainful of Trump.
John Cornyn of Texas, a senior member of the judiciary committee, made headlines by predicting confirmation hearings for Gaetz would be like “Kavanaugh on steroids” – a reference to hearings in 2018 in which Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second supreme court pick, angrily denied sexual assault allegations.
Gaetz, 42, is a hard-right Trump loyalist and dedicated controversialist with scant legal experience. Trump nominated Gaetz to run the justice department even though it recently investigated him over allegations that he paid for sex with women under the age of consent.
While that investigation was dropped and Gaetz vehemently denies wrongdoing, Washington remains abuzz over a House ethics committee report on the matter – and other controversies – which was due to be released before Gaetz resigned to seek confirmation as attorney general.
On Wednesday, the House ethics committee locked on partisan lines, 5-5, in a vote on whether the Gaetz report should be released. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, has said he opposes such a move. Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat, has moved for a vote to secure publication.
“Ethics has their power to get their act together five minutes ago,” Casten told the Washington Post, adding: “What I know at this point is that we cannot trust the ethics committee to do the ethically correct thing.”
There is precedent for the release of an ethics report about a former House member: in 1987 and in the case of William H Boner, a Tennessee Republican accused of corruption.
Casten’s resolution cannot be resolved until after the Thanksgiving recess but Gaetz seems guaranteed to remain in the headlines. As reported by Politico, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee have requested FBI files from the justice department investigation of Gaetz. Outside Congress, an attorney said this week Gaetz paid his client for sex in 2017, when the client was 17 years old and in a state, Florida, where prostitution is illegal.
Joel Leppard, who represents two women who say Gaetz paid them for sex, told NBC: “They want the American people to know the truth and that they are speaking the truth.” The second woman who says she was paid to have sex with Gaetz was 19 at the time, Leppard said.
On Wednesday, ABC News first reported that the ethics committee obtained records showing Gaetz paid more than $10,000 to two women who testified before the panel, with some of the payments being for sex.
In response, a Trump spokesperson pointed to the dropped justice department investigation and said: “These leaks are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the justice department.”
Gaetz continues to deny wrongdoing. On Thursday, the Bulwark said Mike Lee of Utah, a Senate judiciary committee member and Trump ally who was touted for attorney general himself, said Gaetz told him: “There’s no there, there.”
But allegations range further. Last June, the House ethics committee said it was investigating claims that Gaetz “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift”.
Parts of that statement chimed with a now famous quote from Markwayne Mullin, a former House Republican turned Oklahoma senator who told CNN last October: “There’s a reason why no one in the [Republican] conference came and defended [Gaetz], because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.
“This is obviously before he got married.”
