Gaetz blasts ‘uncomfortably nosy’ ethic committee, won’t participate in probe

Rep. Matt Gaetz announced Thursday that he will no longer voluntarily cooperate with an ongoing House Ethics Committee investigation into his allegedly bad conduct.

The investigation reportedly concerns since-debunked allegations that he participated in a sex trafficking scheme with Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg.

While Greenberg was indicted in 2020 for said sex trafficking, the Justice Department ultimately concluded that Gaetz had done nothing wrong and may have in fact been extorted.

But then last year the GOP-lead House Ethics Committee strangely enough decided to open its own investigation into not only this matter but also into whether Gaetz uses illicit drugs.

And then earlier this month the committee reportedly sent Gaetz a letter demanding a list of women he’s slept with in the past 7 years. The letter was the last straw for the lawmaker, who on Thursday submitted a scathing letter of his own to the committee:

“Your investigation into me has devolved into a political payback exercise, devoid of adequate due with leaks, and now seeking deeply personal information that is no business of Congress,” Gaetz begins.

“It seems the fix is in,” he continues. “The Committee has refused to establish an Investigative Subcommittee, as is customary, perhaps because doing so would have time-limited this investigation long ago, and diluted the influence of those on the full committee who are seeking revenge. The Committee has, during the course of its work, released public statements to cast me in a negative light.”

“This was understandably observed as ‘unusual.’ Most shockingly, the Committee’s own membership has participated in funding a recent political campaign against me which utilized the very smears that the Committee now seeks to revive and phony-validate in this investigation. I am being investigated and judged by my political opponents. This is Soviet. This investigation exists to do the voters of my district who won’t remove me from office. The Committee’s own membership tried to remove me from office via election. That failed, so this is the next iteration of the smear.”

Who are these political opponents he mentions? Possibly former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who in April blamed his ouster from office, which was led by Gaetz, on the committee’s investigation.

“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker: because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old girl,” he said at the time.

Listen:

“Your correspondence of September 4 asks whether I have engaged in sexual activity with any individual under 18,” Gaetz continues in his letter. “The answer to this question is unequivocally NO. You can apply this response to every version of this question, in every forum.”

“You ask whether I have illegally taken drugs. I have not used drugs which are illegal, absent some law allowing use in a jurisdiction of the United States. I have not used ‘illicit’ drugs, which I consider to be drugs unlawful for medical or over-the-counter use everywhere in the United States,” he adds.

Gaetz goes on to call the investigation into him “uncomfortably nosey” and addresses the demand for a list of women he’s slept with.

“You ask, in part, whether I’ve had sex with a list of adult women over the past seven years,” he writes. “The lawful, consensual, sexual activities of adults are not the business of Congress. Neither is a detailing of medications I have taken under the color of law.”

“This question about my sexual history reveals a sinister motive of the Committee to harm me and those who have had any association with me. To date, I have voluntarily produced tens of thousands of records and answered many of your relevant questions over several months. But asking about my sexual history as a single man with adult women is a bridge too far. I will no longer voluntarily participate in this regrettable abuse of the Committee,” he concludes.

Vivek Saxena

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