Florida court fight gives insight into the House review of sex allegations against Matt Gaetz
CNN
Accounts of parties involving drugs, alcohol and young women that were allegedly attended by President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, are in the hands of House ethics investigators under pressure to release its findings on the former Florida congressman.
Accounts of parties involving drugs, alcohol and young women that were allegedly attended by President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, are in the hands of House ethics investigators under pressure to release its findings on the former Florida congressman. The evidence related to some of the salacious allegations against Gaetz surfaced in a civil lawsuit brought by one friend of the Florida Republican against another ex-Gaetz associate, now in prison. Several witnesses who gave depositions in the civil case – including the woman whom Gaetz is accused of having sex with when she was a minor in 2017 – have testified to the House committee. The House Ethics Committee probe into Gaetz, initially launched in 2021, ran into several obstacles, including a lack of access to records collected by a federal criminal investigation into Gaetz. However, the congressional investigation picked up steam once lawmakers were pointed in the direction of the civil lawsuit, which has played out in Orlando federal court over the last 18 months. Key evidence there remains under seal, but congressional investigators have obtained other non-public evidence in the case, sources told CNN. What happens to the materials collected by the House ethics panel, including a draft report that was queued up for release before Gaetz resigned to pursue the attorney general post, is a major question for lawmakers as the Senate weighs whether to confirm the former congressman, one of the most contentious of several controversial picks by Trump for his Cabinet. “If the report includes the information the committee received from the [civil] litigation, it would be highly damaging to the congressman,” a source familiar with the congressional investigation told CNN.
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