Congressman Matt Gaetz announced this Thursday that he is resigning his appointment as attorney general in the incoming Donald Trump Administration. Gaetz was in the spotlight due to the investigation that the Congressional Ethics Committee had opened against him for having sexual relations with a minor.
The controversial figure of Gaetz already sparked criticism among some Republican senators when Trump announced his decision last week, so it was not so clear whether he would get the votes necessary for the certification of the position in the Senate. Trump himself had acknowledged in private conversations that Gaetz might not get enough votes.
“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the work of the Trump/Vance transition. There is no time to waste in an unnecessarily protracted fight in Washington, so I will withdraw my name from the nomination to serve as attorney general,” Gaetz wrote in X after the Ethics Committee yesterday reached an impasse over whether to publish or not the report that had been carried out on him these years. The next session they had set to resume voting was December 5.
Trump’s nomination of Gaetz was a pressure test for the system. The Republican wanted to see to what extent his party’s legislators would be willing to cede their power to him. Although Gaetz’s resignation can be read as a first defeat for Trump, it can also be seen as a necessary sacrifice so that Republican senators can ratify the rest of their candidates, who are not exempt from controversy either. The resignation of the Florida congressman would be a way to disguise the docility that the congressmen of his party may present from now on.
The Congressional Ethics Committee had met this Wednesday behind closed doors amid requests to publish the report on Matt Gaetz for having had sexual relations with a minor. Specifically, the committee was investigating Gaetz for sexual misconduct, using illicit drugs, accepting improper gifts and trying to obstruct government investigations into his behavior. The Florida congressman has always rejected all accusations.
Gaetz also resigned his congressional membership last week, the same day Trump had announced that he was choosing him as his attorney general. The resignation came just days before the committee published its report on his case.
Since he is no longer a congressman, the process has been frozen and the document could no longer be published. Even so, various congressmen have pressed for it to be made public, while the speaker House of Representatives Republican Mike Johnson announced Friday that he would “strongly” ask the committee not to release the final report.
The Ethics Committee is a bipartisan body, therefore, in the vote, only one Republican legislator was needed to join the Democrats for the initiative to publish the document to go ahead.
The position that Trump has offered Gaetz is one of the most important within the Department of Justice, which in 2021 also opened an investigation into Gaetz for sex trafficking. According to American media, the case focused on determining whether Gaetz had had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and had paid her to travel with him. Justice closed the process in 2023 without criminal consequences and, then, the committee resumed its investigation.
The day before the committee meeting, an anonymous hacker gained access to a file on the lawyers’ computer of testimony related to Gaetz, according to the New York Times. Among the information stolen by the hacker would be a document with 24 pieces of evidence against the Florida congressman that includes sworn testimony from a woman who said she had sexual relations with Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17 years old, as well as other testimony from a second woman. who claimed to have seen the meeting. The hacker has not made the material public.
Just after Gaetz announced that he was resigning, CNN exclusively reported that the woman who claims to have had sexual relations with him when he was a minor had informed the Ethics Committee of a second encounter. This second encounter would have taken place at a party and another adult woman would have also participated.
Choosing Gaetz as attorney general was also an attempt to drag down the mental framework from which all of his nominees are analyzed. The controversy unleashed by the Florida congressman inside the Capitol has minimized other equally controversial proposals, such as appointing the anti-vaccine Robert F. Kennedy to head the Department of Health.
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