Trump’s controversial nominee for attorney general has withdrawn his name for the position. This took me by surprise since just this morning the House ethics committee was deadlocked on whether to release their report on the various allegations of sexual misconduct, some involving minors, that have plagued him for years. I thought that move would clear the way for his nomination to go through.
In his statement, Gaetz gave the usual ‘for the good of the country’ pablum.
After meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz determined that his nomination was “becoming a distraction to the critical work” of the new Trump administration, he explained on X.
“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s [justice department] must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz said.
…The announcement comes one day after the House ethics committee deadlocked over releasing its report on allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl. The justice department launched its own inquiry of the allegations but declined to bring charges, and Gaetz has consistently denied the claims.
I don’t buy the idea that he withdrew because it would be a distraction. That is not the way these guys roll. Their method is to steamroll over any opposition to their plans and the supine GOP makes that easy. In fact just yesterday, Vance toured the Senate with Gaetz to shore up support for his nomination. So I am guessing that new allegations may have played a role by being credible.
An attorney representing two women who he says testified before the House ethics committee has claimed that the former congressman Matt Gaetz paid both women for sex and that one of the women alleged she witnessed Gaetz having sex with a minor.
The new allegations were revealed by the attorney Joel Leppard during an interview with ABC News on Monday – less than a week after Gaetz resigned from Congress following his nomination by Donald Trump to serve as attorney general in his second administration.
In the interview, Leppard claimed that his clients were paid by Gaetz using Venmo and said that one of the women testified to the committee that she saw Gaetz at a house party in 2017 having sex with a 17-year-old girl.
“She testified that in July of 2017 at his house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Rep Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was 17,” Leppard said.
Gaetz had already resigned from Congress immediately after being nominated, which he may be regretting, though it was that move that shut down the ethics investigation.
Maybe Trump will make him ambassador to the Vatican. They are used to accommodating accused pedophiles.
Gaetz was reelected to his seat in The House for the 2025-2026 period.
It would in a way have been beneficial to have Gaetz in the White House as a reminder of the moral fibre of the administration.
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Another nominee: Hegseth as Secretary of War (a different name has been used after WWII but it is the same old thing).
He has the tattoo ‘Deus Vult’. It is # 1 a crusader slogan and # 2 a neo-nazi slogan.
It is done with the German Fraktur font which was favoured in Germany 1933-1945 and favoured by *neo-nazis*.
nice to see one of the clowns down before they had a chance to stand up, but the cold reality there is a bottomless sea of clowns, well, we’re swimming in it.
I am not so sure that Gaetz will actually resume his seat in 2025. Just because the ethics report might get buried because he’s no longer in office doesn’t mean it won’t get dug up again the moment he returns. Maybe he’s hoping there will be an all-new committee which is more friendly to him, but he can hardly count on that. Or maybe he stupidly thinks that a discontinuity followed by a new congress means a new incidence of “Matt Gaetz” (or alternately, a new incidence of “Representative of voting district FL-1”) treated by the rules as unrelated to the previous one. To be fair, Congress basically functions as a complicated strategy game and the interaction between rules can have unintuitive effects sometimes… but I’d be very surprised if it really worked like that. I suspect he’s waiting to see what, if anything, he can potentially get away with.
On top of threatening to disallow women in the military and being a rightwing cultist Christian Nationalist, Hegseth sexually assaulted a series of women before verbally assaulting (witnessed by hotel staff) and drugging one, holding her prisoner in his room, and raping her, according to a 22-page report* . A nurse who saw the sexual assault victim at the hospital reported it to the police and kicked off the whole investigation.
* https://www.mediaite.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/11-20-24-Mediaite.pdf
sometimes you gaetz what you deserves
Trump gave up so easily that the whole thing could be just a missile test. And Gaetz has already announced that he won’t return to the Congress.