Matt Gaetz is so sleazy even his colleagues are abandoning him


The scandal around Republican congressperson Matt Gaetz keeps swirling and growing. This story has legs, as the kids say these days, meaning that more and more details will emerge as days go by. My feeling is that, even given the penchant that Republicans have for protecting their own at all costs, his days as an elected official are numbered. Even his stated desire to be a TV personality on a right wing news channel seems unlikely to be fulfilled until he spends some time in the wilderness and people forget. That is assuming he stays out of prison. The key thing to bear in mind is that the really serious offense is that he engaged in sex with an underage woman and transported her across state lines. That is the biggest threat to him. Another charge that could put him in trouble is that he used campaign funds to pay for his personal expenses, including presumably for sex.

Investigators apparently stumbled into Gaetz’s role in all this when they were looking into sex trafficking by Joel Greenberg, another Florida politician who is a friend of Gaetz. There is this weird story of the two of them using Greenberg’s access to the Florida drivers license system to, for reasons yet unknown, peruse people’s licenses. It was Greenberg’s text responses to queries about this that apparently led investigators to Gaetz.

He seems to be determined to distance himself from the charge that he paid women for sex, perhaps feeling that its reflects poorly on his attractiveness that he needs to do so. Instead he keeps insisting that he is just ‘very generous’ with his girl friends by giving them lavish gifts, airline tickets, meals, and hotels, though the women tell a very different story.

In encounters during 2019 and 2020, Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg instructed the women to meet at certain times and places, often at hotels around Florida, and would tell them the amount of money they were willing to pay, according to the messages and interviews.

One person said that the men also paid in cash, sometimes withdrawn from a hotel ATM.

Some of the men and women took ecstasy, an illegal mood-altering drug, before having sex, including Mr. Gaetz, two people familiar with the encounters said.

I have argued elsewhere that sex work should not be a criminal offense. Apart from the other arguments against it, it is often the sex workers who are harassed by police and the authorities and punished severely under these laws, while the people who pay for their services are treated lightly.

Gaetz has become so toxic that even Trump, whose praises Gaetz was constantly singing, has not come to his defense. What is also notable is that his fellow congressional Republicans are not only keeping their distance from him, they are even dishing more dirt.

But Gaetz’s lack of support is a minor issue when compared to the growing number of people who are willing to spill sordid new details about his creepy behavior. Multiple people told CNN for a Thursday report that in his two terms as a Florida congressman, Gaetz built a reputation for regularly bragging about his sexual affairs, even showing nude photos and videos of women he said he’d slept with to colleagues on the House floor. One such video reportedly depicted a naked woman using a hula hoop. (CNN doesn’t identify their sources’ political affiliations, but one could safely assume that Gaetz probably wasn’t showing off to his Democratic colleagues.) That comes as Politico reports that then-Attorney General Bill Barr, upon learning of the Justice Department probe into Gaetz last summer, deliberately avoided even being in the same room as Gaetz in order not to appear anywhere near him.

Now a young female Florida Democratic state legislator has come forward with information about being strangely approached by Greenberg and Gaetz, in what looks like a grooming effort.

So it looks like at least some of the claims of QAnon, that there is a sex-trafficking operation being run by Washington politicians, may be true. It is just not by the party and people they thought it was.

Comments

  1. lanir says

    I think you’re just making a joke about QAnon but there are people who believe that crazy, hair-brained nonsense. So it’s probably worth pointing out that the reality is two scumbags who somehow managed to bump into each other. The fiction is a global conspiracy of the kind that would require thousands of people in the endeavor if not tens of thousands. The fiction sounds like it’s probably closer to the size of the oil industry from the little I’ve heard about it.

    This is… two scumbags. And they may not have even managed to bump into the bigger scumbag who operated in their area. It’s awful but the real question isn’t even “Is this guy a scumbag?” so much as it’s “How did the underage woman end up in this situation and is there something that could or should be done to help prevent others from being in the same situation?”*

    * Caveat: Most of the things that could influence the development of situations like this in a direct way are overly heavy handed and cause at least as many problems as they solve. But sometimes there is a neat, specific solution. And when there isn’t, generally a case can be made that more social safety net programs would have helped to reduce the rate at which these things occur.

  2. brucegee1962 says

    This story keeps metastasizing, and looks like to drag down others in the Florida legislature. (Can we assume mostly Republicans? Of course we can!)
    The sordid new details involve a game that involved which male legislators can sleep with the most women, with extra points for married women, virgins, and sorority girls. Harry Potter is also invoked: https://www.businessinsider.com/matt-gaetz-sex-game-florida-staffers-sororities-snitch-harry-potter-2021-4
    The original story from the New York Post: https://nypost.com/2021/04/03/alleged-harry-potter-themed-sex-game-played-gaetz-and-fellow-pols-report/

  3. Holms says

    There is this weird story of the two of them using Greenberg’s access to the Florida drivers license system to, for reasons yet unknown, peruse people’s licenses.

    I can imagine two possible motivations here. One is fairly simple: they were browsing the photos in some idle time to judge and comment on the attractiveness of the women. Or, they were looking for attractive women and also their contact details in an attempt to fuck them.

  4. bmiller says

    lanair: Don’t be so hasty. Of course QAnon is ridiculous, but do we forget so quickly the conveniently suicidal Epstein? An awful lot of business and political leaders (on both sides of the aisle) were “friends” with good ol’ Jeffery.

    The problem with silly conspiracy theories is the government DOES conspire. Elites ARE corrupt and criminal.

  5. publicola says

    This time “Mad Dog” Matt Gaetz bit himself in the ass. Funny how the most conservative of conservatives always seem to be the worst offenders. Wouldn’t it be nice if somehow Jim Jordan was mixed up in all this, too.

  6. GenghisFaun says

    “Underage woman” is an oxymoron that Republicans and sex offenders (am I repeating myself?) like to use to deflect blame back onto the victim, because [sarcasm] We all know that women are wily seductresses that bend even the most forthright men to their will. Men simply have no agency in these situations. [/sarcasm]
     
    I humbly suggest “woman” should be changed to “girl”, “female”, or “person” to more accurately reflect the utter depravity of Gaetz’ predatory behavior.

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