GaetzGate
Congress' Trumpiest Republican, Florida's Matt Gaetz, is allegedly under investigation by the FBI for having had sex with a teenage girl.
It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Tuesday night, the news broke from multiple news outlets that Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz — a top Trump ally — was under investigation by the FBI for an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz denies all of this — we’ll get to that in a moment.
Gaetz, you’ll recall, announced last summer that he has a son — even though he legally doesn’t. It’s a weird story, that got a bit wilder once I read up on these latest allegations. Let me explain.
Gaetz’s “son” Nestor
Gaetz says that seven years ago he was dating a woman in Florida whose younger 12-year-old brother, Nestor, had just arrived from Cuba. The kids’ mother had just died, and the boy moved to Florida to live with his sister. As the sister was dating Gaetz at the time, Nestor moved in with them, and stayed even after his sister broke up with Gaetz. Nestor is now approximately 20-years-old. Last summer, Gaetz publicly revealed Nestor’s existence, and referred to Nestor as his “son,” even though Gaetz has not adopted the young man.
Fast forward to the final months of the Trump administration. Trump’s Justice Department approves an investigation into Gaetz’s alleged relationship with a 17-year-old girl two years ago. Around the same time, Gaetz proposes to a woman, Ginger Luckey, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.
Adding to his woes, in 2017, Gaetz was the sole “no” vote — in the entire Congress — against an anti-human-trafficking bill:
Gaetz cast the lone "no" vote on a widely bipartisan human trafficking bill that passed unanimously through the U.S. Senate in September before sailing through the House by a count of 418 to 1.
The legislation — the Combating Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act — is an attempt to give the federal government more resources to combat the sex trade in the U.S., such as a human trafficking prevention coordinator at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a committee in the department to help develop best practices to fight human trafficking.
Rumors that Gaetz will resign hours before FBI story breaks
Fast forward to Tuesday morning. Axios gets the scoop that Gaetz is considering retiring early, and taking a job at the far-right Web site Newsmax. At this point, the news is not yet public that the FBI may be investigating Gaetz. A few hours later, the New York Times reports that Gaetz “is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him.”
Matt Gaetz is actually a secret agent!
That gets us to Tuesday evening, when Gaetz tells Axios that he’s actually the victim of an extortion scheme, and that’s why the FBI was involved — because Gaetz and his father were working with the FBI to catch the extortionist!
"The allegations of sexual misconduct against me are false. They are rooted in an extortion effort against my family for $25 million … in exchange for making this case go away."
More from a Gaetz statement issued that same evening:
"We have been cooperating with federal authorities in this matter and my father has even been wearing a wire at the FBI’s direction to catch these criminals…. The planted leak to the New York Times tonight was intended to thwart that investigation. No part of the allegations against me are true, and the people pushing these lies are targets of the ongoing extortion investigation. I demand the DOJ immediately release the tapes, made at their direction, which implicate their former colleague in crimes against me based on false allegations.”
Gaetz’s awful Fox News interview
Also Tuesday evening, Gaetz goes on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. In an incredible, and bizarre, interview, Gaetz first reminds Fox viewers that Tucker was himself implicated in a sexual misconduct scandal:
Things got even spicier when Gaetz appeared to draft Tucker into the whole affair:
Gaetz then says that someone is claiming there are pictures of Gaetz with child prostitutes — hoo boy:
Gaetz says travel records will exonerate him. Wash Post say nuh-uh.
One more thing. During the Fox interview, Gaetz claimed that an examination of his travel records would exonerate him:
“It is a horrible allegation, and it is a lie. The New York Times is running a story that I have traveled with a 17-year-old woman, and that is verifiably false. People can look at my travel records and see that that is not the case…. I have not had a relationship with a 17-year-old. That is totally false. … And records will bear that out to be false.”
So, the Washington Post asked Gaetz if they could review those travel records. Radio silence from Team Gaetz:
We repeatedly asked Gaetz’s chief of staff Jillian Lane Wyant and his spokesman Luke Ball to show us the travel records supposedly debunking the allegations and received no response. We also sent a text message directly to Gaetz with our query and got no reply.
So the reviewed the publicly available travel records for Gaetz and found nothing exculpatory.
Both stories can be true
Some in the media are casting doubt on Gaetz’s extortion claim. But regardless, being the victim of an extortion plot doesn’t preclude you from also having had sex with a minor. It could work something like this:
Extortionist tells you they have evidence you had sex with a minor, and they want $1 million to keep it quiet.
You tell FBI about the extortion, they investigate.
FBI finds evidence that you did have sex with a minor.
FBI now investigates you and the extortionist.
Thus, both cold be true: Gaetz could have been blackmailed, and he could still be under investigation for sex with a minor.
And in fact, a new story from the Daily Beast suggests, to me at least, that the extortion plot just might be real. Though, as a lawyer myself, I’m not fully convinced that this is extortion. The people seeking money weren’t threatening to go public if Gaetz didn’t pay. Rather, they were seeking Gaetz’s money to, among other things, make the FBI investigation go away entirely. That, to me, sounds more like a bribe than extortion. Regardless, there’s so much detail in this story, that it sounds like this part of Gaetz’s story might just be true.
There’s also an interesting new detail in the Daily Beast piece: The money-seekers told Gaetz’s dad that the FBI investigators had photographs of Gaetz and an unnamed election official in a “sexual orgy with underage prostitutes.”
Republicans say Gaetz can stay
Republicans in Congress have just weighed in, saying they’ll take Gaetz’s committee seats away from him if he did in fact have a sexual relationship with a minor while serving in Congress.
Note what McCarthy doesn’t say — that Gaetz will be forced to step down should he be found guilty. So it’s totally okay to keep your seat in Congress if you’re involved in the human sex trafficking of minors. A bad position for anyone, let alone a party whose base is intimately enmeshed with sex-trafficking conspiracy theory QAnon.
Other Interesting Stuff
Fifteen years ago, a group of bloggers met with former President Bill Clinton. I was one of them. It was an amazing meeting. Man, that guy is smart.
An article that makes my midwestern heart — and mouth — swoon. It’s healthy to talk to strangers!
Ted Cruz is making friends in San Antonio:
And I’ll conclude with a beautiful sunset we had in DC the other night. It’s full-blown spring here, with occasional sprinkles of winter (it got up to 80F the other day, but we’ll be hitting a low of 28F for a few nights still).
Chat with you all in a few days.
JOHN
Rather than commenting, I'll just let Matt Gaetz continue to speak for himself.