The House Ethics Committee report on Donald Trump’s ally Matt Gaetz released on Monday revealed fresh details about the former congressman’s alleged behaviour, at least one new accusation and insights into the panel’s investigation.
According to the report, from 2017 to 2020, the former Florida congressman regularly paid women for “engaging in sexual activity”, had sex with a 17-year-old girl, used or possessed illegal drugs, accepted gifts beyond House limits and helped a woman obtain a passport, according to the report.
The 42-year-old was first elected as a Republican member of the US House of Representatives in 2016.
He resigned in November – days before the report was scheduled to be made public and after Trump announced him as his pick for US attorney general. Gaetz withdrew from consideration a week later.
He denied the committee’s findings and has accused it of conducting an unfair investigation.
Tribune Online explains major parts of House ethics report;
A winding money trail
House investigators said Gaetz paid more than $90,000 (£71,843) to women for sex and drugs but created a complicated web of transactions that were hard to trace, according to the report.
According to the report, “The committee was unable to determine the full extent to which Representative Gaetz’s payments to women were compensation for engaging in sexual activity with him.”
He allegedly used his friend, Joel Greenberg, currently serving 11 years in prison for crimes he said he committed with Gaetz, as a frequent go-between and logged onto Greenberg’s account on SeekingArrangement.com, which bills itself as a “luxury dating site”, to interact with young women.
Gaetz also paid women directly, sometimes through platforms such as Venmo, according to the report.
However, the committee said he often used another person’s PayPal account or an account linked to an email address with a fake name.
He also obscured payments, the panel wrote. In one example, he gave a college student a cheque made out to “cash” with “tuition reimbursement” in the memo line. The woman said she received it after a group encounter, which “could potentially be a form of coercion because I really needed the money”.
Another woman who was considered his girlfriend invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked if she was given money for sex or drugs, or to pay others.
The committee attempted to prove Gaetz frequently paid for sex through evidence such as a text message where he reportedly baulked at a woman’s request that he send her money after he accused her of “ditching” him one night. The woman then asserted she was “treated differently” than other women he was paying for sex.
As a Congressman, Gaetz earned $174,000 (£138,843) a year and on his most recent federal financial disclosure filed in August, he reported owning assets worth at least $575,000. His father Don Gaetz, who co-founded hospice provider Vitas Healthcare, has a fortune of about $35m, Forbes reported.
Sex, drugs, and a passport application
The report also stated that Gaetz bought illegal drugs or reimbursed people for them and gave examples of his alleged cocaine and ecstasy/MDMA use, but focused on what appeared to be a heavy marijuana habit.
The committee disclosed that Gaetz allegedly asked women to bring marijuana cartridges to meetings and events and created a fake-name email account to buy marijuana.
A trip he took to the Bahamas “was paid for by an associate of Representative Gaetz with connections to the medical marijuana industry, who allegedly also paid for female escorts to accompany them”, according to the report.
One woman felt the use of drugs and alcohol at parties had impaired her ability “to really know what was going on or fully consent”.
“Indeed, nearly every woman that the committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption,” the report said.
His then-girlfriend, who was 21 when they met and “was paid tens of thousands of dollars” during their two-year relationship”, often participated in encounters with women and acted as an intermediary, according to the report.
A woman who told the committee she was 17 at the time she had sex with Gaetz twice at a party in 2017 – at least once in front of other people – while under the influence of ecstasy. The woman, who had just completed her junior year in high school, then received $400 from him.
She also told the panel she did not tell Gaetz she was a minor and the committee did not find any evidence that the former congressman knew she was underage.
The age of consent in Florida is 18, although a 16 or 17-year-old can legally consent to sexual conduct with a person between the ages of 16 and 23. Gaetz turned 35 in 2017.
The Department of Justice investigated an allegation that he had sex with a minor but ultimately did not file any criminal charges against him.
In 2021, Greenberg pleaded guilty to sex trafficking the girl. According to his plea agreement, Greenberg paid for sex acts with the minor and introduced her to other adult men who engaged in commercial sex acts with her.
Gaetz also allegedly directed his chief of staff to expedite a passport application for a woman he was sleeping with, whom he said was a voter in his district. He also allegedly gave her $1,000.
Accusations of obstruction
The committee dedicated a great deal of the report to detailing how Gaetz allegedly obstructed its investigation, including failing to produce evidence he said would “exonerate” him.
The report concluded he “continuously sought to deflect, deter, or mislead the Committee to prevent his actions from being exposed”.
Gaetz, who has accused the committee of being “weaponised” against him and leaking information to the press, alleged the panel was working on behalf of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, according to the report. Last year he helped lead an effort to oust then-Speaker McCarthy from his role.
While Gaetz claimed he had “voluntarily produced tens of thousands of records,” he gave the committee “only a couple hundred records, more than 90% of which was either irrelevant or publicly available,” the report found.
One sore point was a trip to the Bahamas, where the committee said he withheld information. Ultimately it concluded he violated rules on gifts because the trip was too high in value.
The committee also cited the Justice Department’s probe into the allegations against Gaetz as a reason for delays.
Some witnesses asked the committee to use statements they had given to the department, but it refused to share them because they had not issued charges and because it said it could deter future witnesses in other cases from coming forward.
Committee chairman dissents
The report ends with a single-page statement from Ethics Committee Chairman Michael Guest “on behalf of dissenting committee members” who are not named.
Those members do not challenge the committee’s findings, but disagree with releasing the report after Gaetz resigned from the House, which has not happened since 2006, they write.
It “breaks from the Committee’s long-standing practice, opens the Committee to undue criticism, and will be viewed by some as an attempt to weaponise the Committee’s process”.
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