The eight-day delusion of Donald Trump that Matt Gaetz would actually become the United States attorney general and oversee the federal Department of Justice ended yesterday when the absolutely unfit Gaetz, facing exposure, embarrassment and Senate rejection, folded.
Now that Trump has had his fun with the right-wing firebrand Gaetz, it’s time to get serious and find a real lawyer, with the experience, ethical bearing and sound judgment (all of which Gaetz lacks) to be America’s highest ranking law enforcement official. We will see if his new pick, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, meets the standard.
As for the gentleman from Florida, the House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz’s conduct regarding allegations of his sexual encounter with an underage girl and the payment of funds to adult women for sex must be published. The bipartisan ethics panel split when they met this week, with the committee’s five Republicans under great pressure from Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson to keep the Gaetz report secret.
When the committee reconvenes on Dec. 5, a 10-0 vote to publish the findings is a must.
CNN reported yesterday they asked Gaetz that the Ethics Committee had been told of a second liaison with the same 17-year-old girl and instead of responding to the network, he went on Elon Musk’s X and posted that he was giving up because: “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”
The only “momentum” was the inevitability that the report was going to come out with its very bad stuff and that Republican senators were fleeing by the hour.
“Distraction” is something that Gaetz knows well, it’s his specialty. He toppled House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, because, as McCarthy says, the speaker let the ethics probe go forward. Even how the Gaetz nomination came about was off the wall. It literally was on the fly, as Gaetz happened to be on Trump’s plane and convinced the incoming president to make him AG. Why not? That sounds good over a McDonald’s meal on the plane.
It wasn’t the Democrats or the “deep state” that undid Gaetz. It was his own monumental unfitness and the ethics probe just made it easier for GOP senators to say no.
Gaetz quit Congress last week to block the release of the ethics report, thinking he could escape its findings and land at Justice, a neat two-for-one maneuver.
Now he’s not going to be AG and he’s no longer a congressman. He can’t unresign from 118th Congress that ends on Jan 3. The question is if he can still take his seat in the 119th Congress that starts the same day. He won reelection this month, but in his resignation letter, read out loud by the clerk on the floor of the House and entered into the Congressional Record, he wrote that he would not take his seat. Can he go back on that?
Or maybe when Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is confirmed to be secretary of state, Gaetz can get Gov. Ron DeSantis to appoint him to the Senate to exact revenge on the GOP senators who blocked him. Gaetz was the most hated man in the House. He could then be the most hated man in the Senate.