The U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee failed Wednesday to reach agreement on whether to release findings from its nearly finished investigative report on former Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general.
The panel’s chair, Republican Representative Michael Guest, emerged from a lengthy committee meeting, saying, “There was no agreement by the committee to release the report.”
He declined further comment. The other nine committee members — four Republicans and five Democrats — also did not comment immediately.
Gaetz was accused of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use before he was picked by Trump to become the country’s top law enforcement official in the new administration that takes office on January 20.
Two news outlets, ABC News and The Washington Post, reported that the committee had obtained documents that showed Gaetz paid two women who appeared before the committee as witnesses a total of more than $10,000 between July 2017 and late January 2019. The women, who were over the age of 18 at the time of the payments, told the panel that some of the money was for sex.
A Trump transition spokesman defended Gaetz in a statement.
“The Justice Department received access to roughly every financial transaction Matt Gaetz ever undertook and came to the conclusion that he committed no crime. These leaks are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department,” with Gaetz at the head of the agency, the spokesman said.
Several U.S. senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, are demanding that the report be released so they can consider the scope of Gaetz’s background as they undertake their constitutionally mandated role of confirming or rejecting a new president’s Cabinet nominees.
Hours after Trump named him as a nominee, Gaetz, 42, resigned from Congress, even though he had just been reelected to a fifth term. His resignation ended the House Ethics Committee’s investigation, which had been nearing a conclusion.
It remained uncertain whether the panel would divulge what conclusions lawmakers had reached. With the allegations hovering over him, Gaetz quickly became Trump’s most controversial selection for his Cabinet, although the president-elect has continued to support him and has been making calls to lawmakers to bolster his chances of confirmation.
Gaetz was in the Capitol Wednesday to meet with some of the senators who will decide his fate. The Senate has not voted to reject a presidential nominee for a Cabinet position since 1989, with members of both political parties giving wide deference to new presidents to fill top-level jobs with appointees of their choosing.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said he met with Gaetz and Vice President-elect JD Vance, still a sitting senator, and told them there would be “no rubber stamps, no lynch mobs” in the confirmation process.
“These allegations will be dealt with in committee, but [Gaetz] deserves a chance to confront his accusers,” Graham told reporters.
The Justice Department investigated the allegations against him but last year declined to bring any charges.
Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee that will consider the Gaetz nomination asked the FBI to release the evidentiary file from its investigation.
That material would include interviews with a woman who said she was paid to have sex with Gaetz when she was 17. Gaetz has denied the accusations.
Representative Dean Phillips, a Democrat who previously served on the House Ethics Committee, said Gaetz's situation — a former member of Congress nominated for one of the most powerful jobs in the U.S. government — is an argument in favor of releasing the report.
"He's not just gone [from the House]. He's now been nominated for a very important position in this country, which is the chief legal officer, if you will, of the country. It would seem bizarre and incongruent with any ethical principle to not release it," Phillips said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who leads the narrow Republican majority in the House, has said he is opposed to the release of the as-yet unfinished report by the House Ethics Committee because Gaetz is no longer a member of Congress. But reports about wrongdoing by other former members of Congress have been released in a few instances in the past.
Ultimately, the Senate, which Republicans will control by at least a 52-48 margin next year, will decide whether to confirm Gaetz, who has never worked at the Justice Department or served as a prosecutor at any level of government.
But Gaetz, like other Trump nominees for top government jobs, has been a vocal supporter of the president and his Make America Great Again agenda.
Gaetz, however, angered some fellow Republican lawmakers in the House in 2023 by spearheading the effort to oust then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who eventually was replaced by Johnson.
