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Donald's pick for Attorney General, now-former Congressman Matt Gaetz has faced dual investigations over the last three years—one conducted by the Department of Justice, and the other by the House Ethics Committee. The probes stemmed from allegations of sex trafficking allegations a minor and paid sexual relationships as well as Gaetz’s alleged drug use, his doing special favors to associates, and obstructing investigations.
While the DOJ declined to bring charges (thanks, Merrick Garland), the Ethics Committee was poised to release its report, but declined to do so following Gaetz’s timely resignation from Congress, which just happened to coincide with the report’s release.
Gaetz’s intention, obviously, was to avoid accountability which has, so far, succeeded. The Committee reconvened today to vote on whether to release its findings.
Regardless of what the Ethics Committee ultimately does, a man named Altam Beezley hacked dozens of unredacted legal depositions from the Gaetz case rendering their actions moot.
According to NBC, among those documents was the testimony of a young woman who was 17 years old in 2017. She testified that Gaetz had sex with her at a “drug-fueled” party in Florida. There is further testimony from another woman who says that she witnessed Gaetz having sex with her then-underaged friend.
Depositions from two other women allege Gaetz paid for sex via Venmo, and a full chart outlining some of the Venmo transactions can be found in Exhibit Six of the Ethics Committee report. Gaetz also made payments by check which were made out to cash with “tuition reimbursement” written on the memo line.
There's no doubt in my mind that Republicans, including and especially my uncle, know exactly what Gaetz has done. Many have said as much to the press, including Markwayne Mullin (R-OK):
[Gaetz] was accused of sleeping with an underage girl, and there's a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the house floor that all of us had walked away, of the girls that he had slept with. He'd brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.
In anticipation of the Ethics Committee meeting today, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted this:
For my Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, if we're going to release ethic reports and rip apart our own, that Trump meaning Donald has appointed, then put it all out there for the American people to see. Yes, all the ethic reports and claims, including the one I filed, all your sexual harassment and assault claims that were secretly settled, paying off victims with taxpayer money, the entire Jeffrey Epstein files, tapes, recordings, witness interviews, but not just those, there's more. Epstein isn't the only asset if we're going to dance, let's all dance in the sunlight. I'll make sure we do.
Unless I'm grossly mistaken here, it's the Republican party that has to worry about those kinds of revelations. If you remember, such calls for transparency on the right have not worked out well for other Republican so-called “truth tellers.” Remember Madison Cawthorne?
While still in Congress, Cawthorne claimed that fellow lawmakers invited him to an orgy and did cocaine in front of him. Suffice it to say, Cawthorne was primaried and is no longer a member of Congress.
Much of what we’re seeing play out with the Ethics Committee is atypical. Comprised of five Republicans and five Democrats, they usually make decisions unanimously. Today’s decision, 5-5 along party lines not to release the report, was highly unusual. Not only that, but it's extremely rare for the public to know anything about the Committee's inner workings.
After today’s meeting was adjourned, however, Chairman Michael Wild (R-MS) told reporters that he didn't think the Committee had jurisdiction anymore to release information about Gaetz. In response to this very unusual public communication, ranking member, Susan Wild (D-PA) made a statement on behalf of all of the Democratic members. She said that she hadn't planned to comment, but the Chairman had “betrayed the process by disclosing the deliberations and implying that there was an agreement of the committee not to disclose the report that is inaccurate.”
Wild made it very clear she does not want the American public to be misled by Chairman Guest’s blatant and intentional mischaracterization that there was agreement among the members of the committee because that is not true. The committee plans to reconvene on December 5th, although I’m not sure why.
There's a point at which none of this matters, except perhaps as an indication of just how far Republicans are willing to go to protect Matt Gaetz, a viciously corrupt man whom most of them hate, all for the sake of doing Donald Trump's bidding.
We have the hacked document; we have Republicans going on the record to call Matt Gaetz out; we have the potentially imminent release of the report. Yet it all may be irrelevant. We had all of the information we needed about Donald Trump—we knew he was an adjudicated rapist; we knew he was an adjudicated business fraud; we knew he incited an insurrection and stole government documents; we knew he was convicted on 34 felony accounts. None of it mattered.
Even without the allegations of sex trafficking, we know that Matt Gaetz is a deeply depraved, deeply unqualified nominee, and every single Republicans in Congress knows it, too. The sex trafficking, however, just makes him all the more attractive as a nominee to Donald Trump and he has been personally calling Republican senators, urging them to get on board.
Donald is doubling down on backing Gaetz because that's what he does. He refers to Gaetz as the “hammer of justice,” which is creepily reminiscent of his asking “where is my Roy Cohn.”
Sex offenders in the Republican party are a dime-a-dozen at this point. And why wouldn't they be? Donald is one of them. He’s also their leader and, as we're finding out, their protector.
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