Trump’s Blunt Response on Whether He’s Reconsidering Gaetz
His nominee for attorney general faces an uphill confirmation battle in the Senate.
Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that he wouldn’t be withdrawing his controversial nomination of former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general.
“No,” the president-elect told reporters in Texas when asked whether he would reconsider Gaetz in light of the controversies surrounding his candidacy.
The selection took many—including some Republican senators—by surprise last week.
Gaetz was the subject of a Department of Justice investigation into sex trafficking. That probe was dropped with no charges filed against him, but it did result in a sex trafficking conviction of a friend of Gaetz’s, Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg.
Gaetz has since become the target of a House Ethics Committee investigation, which probed accusations that he had sex with a minor and that he paid for sex. Gaetz denies all of the charges.
The panel reportedly heard testimony from a woman who claimed she was at a party where she saw Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old girl.
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Gaetz resigned from Congress within hours of Trump announcing him as his pick for attorney general, effectively ending the probe. The House Ethics Committee doesn’t have authority to investigate people who aren’t members of Congress.
It remains unclear whether the committee’s probe will be made public—though a lawyer for the then-minor has called for it to be released.
A lawyer for the two women who claim Gaetz paid them for sex, Joel Leppard, has recently conducted several media interviews describing what his clients told the panel.
“She testified to the House that as she was walking out to the pool area, she turned to her right and she witnessed … her friend having sex with Representative Gaetz. And her friend at that time was 17," he told CNN Monday night.
Leppard said his clients testified that payments for sex from Gaetz lasted from the summer of 2017 through early 2019.
“There were events at Airbnbs. There were events at individuals’ houses. There were events that took place at political events,” Leppard told OutFront anchor Erin Burnett. “There was a trip to New York. There’s a trip to Bahamas. So events like this did happen from time to time, perhaps over 10 times over the course of July 2017 to early January 2019.”
One alleged instance was in New York in 2019, Leppard told ABC News, when Gaetz paid for two woman to travel there (across state lines) to watch his Fox News appearance, see the Broadway show Pretty Woman: The Musical, and have sex with him.
Gaetz has repeatedly denied the claims.
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