The Daily - Matt Gaetz Calls It Quits

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

After just nine days as Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration.Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The Times, discusses the revelations and the reporting that doomed the prospective nomination of Gaetz, a former representative of Florida.Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, covering Washington.Background reading: Matt Gaetz withdraws from consideration for attorney general.A federal inquiry traced payments from Gaetz to women.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. After just nine days as Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, former Congressman Matt Gates of Florida has withdrawn from consideration. Today, Mike Schmidt on the revelations and the reporting that doomed Gates' nomination. It's Friday, November 22nd. Mike, welcome back to the studio for your second recording of the day. Sure. We had, a couple of hours ago, finished recording a roundtable with four of our colleagues,

including you, and Katie Edmondson, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan. Literally, we finished, we said thank you, we walked out of this room and we learned that Matt Gaetz was withdrawing as Trump's pick for attorney general because that piece of information rendered our entire conversation out of date. Correct. So we want to thank them for their work, which will never be aired. And thank you for sticking around to tell us the rest of this story.

Let's go. Okay. So at the start of this week, the question which we had posed in an episode of The Daily About Matt Gaetz was whether we were going to see the results of a house ethics investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct, including allegedly sex with a minor, and his alleged drug use. And like one of the first things that happened after our episode ran was that the Republican Speaker

of the House weighed in on that question. Just start the clock there. So Speaker Johnson came out and said, I don't think this report should be released. The Ethics Committee had looked at a range of his different conduct, and they looked like they were coming to the end of their investigation, and they were going to be putting a report out about what they found. But the argument that Republicans were making that because Gates had stepped down, because

he's no longer a member of Congress, the committee should not release the report. We don't issue investigations and ethics reports on people who are not members of Congress. I'm afraid that that would open a Pandora's box because the jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee is limited. Right. And that's the argument that Speaker Mike Johnson puts forward. He says, not a member of the House, not subject to this report ever becoming public, end of discussion.

Correct. And I think this would be a breach of protocol that could be dangerous for us going forward in the future. Which is, of course, a victory for Gates and for Trump, who's putting him up for AG. And meanwhile, with this report locked up in a cabinet somewhere on Capitol Hill, Trump calling in his number two vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, to nudge his soon-to-be former colleagues, the Ohio senator with Gates at his side. J.D. Vance, the now vice president-elect, shows up on Capitol Hill with Matt Gaetz in tow to, it seemed, start drumming up support for a potential Senate confirmation.

This is going great. Senator has been giving me a lot of good advice. I'm looking forward to a hearing. As far as it went for the Trump folks, they were moving ahead with their nomination. They were taking their nominee up to Capitol Hill, parading him before senators, and trying to get him confirmed. Right, trying to make this into sense as normal a ritual as has ever happened with somebody up for a big job in Washington.

This just in a major announcement from Capitol Hill. The House Ethics Committee has voted to not release its report on former representative Matt Gaetz. And in another positive sign for Gaetz, the Ethics Committee decides not to release a copy of the report. Democrats on the committee are furious, saying they want the report out, but the Republicans refused. So that's where we are as of Wednesday afternoon, early evening, I believe. And that, Mike, is where you, as you frequently do in these moments,

enter the story with your reporting. So just describe what happened So I really wanted to get my hands on the ethics investigation you and every other journalist Yeah, but I thought that was gonna be really hard But I knew that there had been a three-year long Justice Department investigation that looked at whether gauge should be charged for having sex with a 17 year old girl who was paid for whether Gates should be charged for having sex with a 17-year-old girl who was paid for. In the course of my reporting, I learned that the Ethics Committee had obtained a range of information and documentation from that investigation.

So my thought was, could I get my hands on some of the evidence the committee had obtained? In the course of that, I got my hands on a document that federal investigators had created as they were looking at Gates. And that document was a chart, a bunch of different faces of people, including Gates and the women, and it's lines going from Gates to the women

with arrows and dollar figures. Right. And when you step back and take a look at it, it's an incredible web and shows the great detail that the investigators went to, to try and understand what Gates was doing and who he was sending money to. And it was significant because the women had testified

to the ethics committee that they had had sex with Gates for money. And this document backed that up because it showed thousands and thousands of dollars in Venmo payments that Gates had made to them that had been documented by the federal investigators. What if anything does this document say about the most serious of the accusations that have been made against Gates, which is that he had sex with an underage girl?

It does not show any payments between Gates and the girl. But it does show that Gates' friend, a guy named Joel Greenberg, who set up many of these encounters, had sent several hundred dollars worth of money to the 17-year-old girl. And that was significant because it appeared to back up what Greenberg had told investigators. Which is what? That he and Gates both had sex with the 17 year old

girl for money. It seems worth saying this document is residing in a house ethics report, correct me if I'm wrong, that the speaker of the house and the Republicans on the ethics committee have decided that the public should not see, even as it considers Matt Gaetz to be the lead law enforcement official of the United States. We don't know if the actual chart is in the final version of the report, but we know that this is what the ethics committee had obtained during their investigation as they were trying to get to the bottom of the allegations.

I was quite struck by what Gates said when he learned, and those around him learned, that you had this document, Mike. And the response, and I want you to kind of translate it for us, is that you possessing this document is why the country needed Matt Gaetz as attorney general. They accused the Justice Department of leaking the document. And they said the department had investigated Gaetz for several years. They never charged him and were essentially now using it to undermine him.

And it was that type of action, that type of politicalization of investigative work that Gates needed to come into the department to take care of. The larger argument they're trying to say is that Donald Trump has been constantly undermined by the deep state and the Justice Department. That's what's happening to Matt Gaetz right now.

And that's why he has to be attorney general, because he has to put an end to this type of behavior. So all of this ends up being the backdrop as we enter Thursday, the day we are sitting here talking, and the day in which Matt Gaetz, right after we finished recording our roundtable, sends out a tweet. He basically says that his confirmation is becoming an unnecessary distraction for the incoming Trump administration. And while he had great meetings on Capitol Hill with senators, he is going to be pulling his nomination.

And just like that, Matt Gaetz was no longer Donald Trump's nominee to be attorney general. We'll be right back. Mike, for Matt Gaetz to have withdrawn as Trump's pick for Attorney General, the Trump team must have concluded that he couldn't win Senate confirmation at a moment when Trump is brimming with self-confidence and reveling in his ability to force controversial cabinet picks through the Senate confirmation process. So why exactly do we think that Trump goes around him reached the conclusion that this pick couldn't get through, that it was doomed.

This is the track that the nomination was on. If Gates went forward, he was almost certainly going to have to testify before the Senate at a confirmation hearing. At that hearing, he would almost certainly have been asked, have you paid women for sex? Right. And that would have put him in the situation of either saying, yes, I did,

which would have created a whole storm around it. Right. Cause in theory it might be the future attorney general saying under oath that he broke the law. Correct. If he said no, the Democrats would almost certainly say, you're under oath and you're perjuring yourself because there's all this other evidence that it indeed did happen. And the third option he would have had, which most lawyers probably would have counseled

him to do, is to have taken the Fifth Amendment. Mm-hmm. So you would have had a potential incoming attorney general taking the Fifth Amendment Against self-incrimination. As he answered questions under oath before Congress about a federal investigation into him as he was trying to become the attorney general. Right. That, as they say, is a sticky wicket. That's just quite something even by the measures of the Trump story. And no matter what Gates's answer in any of those three scenarios, it would have put Senate

Republicans in an exceptionally difficult position of having to vote against a Trump nominee or accepting, in this case case a Trump nominee that they were not eager to confirm. Well, at the very least, they were going to have to litigate whether the allegations that Gates had sex with women for money were true or not. Right. And therefore would have forced Senate Republicans to choose whom to trust, Gates or these women. Correct. It does feel notable that Trump chose not to force

this vote and not to force this showdown with Senate Republicans. He obviously made a choice here and he said to Matt Gates, or at least someone around him said it with his approval, that's it, I'm sorry, you're done. I mean, you don't see it every day, but every once in a while, you see in Trump's world where the line is. Trump puts up with behavior amongst his allies and people around him, unlike any other politician we've ever seen. He allows people in that have counterintelligence

problems that have been accused of a litany of different things. Who are under investigation. You name it. Literally like a buffet of different things. He lets all these folks in the house. But every once in a while, you get to see that there are some things that they will not tolerate. So when someone's nomination is pulled, or someone is fired or they resign, you get to

see where the line is. And today we see where it is. Well, there's a complexity to this line. And clearly, Gates's situation is unique. The number of women he has alleged to have paid for sex, the fact that one is a minor, the fact that he was picked to run the Justice Department, that all makes it unique.

But we should point out that if the line for a Trump pick is serious accusations of sexual misconduct, we now have another Trump pick, Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense, who is facing his own set of allegations of sexual misconduct. Correct. Because as the Gates story was coming into its final hours, a police report about Hegseth comes out that details accusations of rape against him. The woman says that he assaulted her in a California hotel room. He denies that that happened. Right, he says it was consensual.

But what we do know is that he later reached a financial settlement with her that essentially silenced her from speaking out against him. And as for this question of whether this line applies to Hegseth, we are seeing that Hegseth is up on Capitol Hill with JD Vance, the same way that Gates was with JD Vance a couple of days ago. And it seems that Hegseth's reception so far from Senate Republicans is pretty positive.

So we'll have to watch that pretty closely. Mike, when it comes to the AG pick, there's now a vacancy. And there's already talk of who Trump might replace Gates with. And one of the names that seems to be under consideration is a former personal lawyer to Trump. His name is Todd Blanch. He represented Trump in his criminal hush money

trial in Manhattan. What do you make of that? So if Trump hadn't nominated Gates to be attorney general, what we likely would have been concentrating on is the fact that he had announced that he was going to put Blanche in as his deputy attorney general. Hmm, number two. Correct. And why is that so significant?

The president would have been putting his personal lawyer in at the top of the department. So the department is supposed to have this image of independence and following the laws and the evidence. But in this case, you would have had a lawyer who had defended the president in a criminal case in which he was convicted. And in terms of the norms that usually govern presidents,

that is something that most presidents would not consider. Putting forward a personal lawyer who they have paid money to. And have an attorney-client relationship with. Right, and so far we are not very focused on Todd Blanch. And to that point, I wanna read you what our colleague, Jonathan Swan, said about the way that this is all played out. He said it in a roundtable that we have decided not to run.

This is what he said. The controversy surrounding Gates has already served a purpose for Trump, whether intended or not. It has made other Trump choices for cabinet picks appear more reasonable by comparison. In other words, what Jonathan is saying is that Gates and all the controversy around him means that getting the next pick for Attorney General

through is likely to be much easier even if they represent somebody who might be just as outside the norm or as loyal to Trump as Gates. Do you buy into that? I do because objectively, whoever comes after Gates will almost certainly not be as controversial as he is. And that will make that person more palatable to Senate Republicans who know that they're not going to have to figure out whether allegations from women their late teens and early 20s who said they had sex with Gates for money are telling the truth. Mike, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

On Thursday night, President-elect Trump announced that his new pick for attorney general would be Pam Bondi, a former Republican attorney general of Florida. Bondi, a member of Trump's legal team during his first impeachment, is viewed as highly loyal to Trump, and most importantly, as acceptable to the Senate Republicans who will have to confirm her. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel

and his former defense minister Yoav Galant, accusing both men of carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity inside of Gaza. The warrants could subject both men to arrest in dozens of countries and deals an extraordinary blow to Israel's standing across the globe. At the same time, the court issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas's military chief, Mohammed Daif. But the court acknowledged it was unsure

whether Daif is dead or alive. In Washington, the White House forcefully rejected the legitimacy of the court's arrest warrant for the Israeli leaders, and said it has no plans to honor them. Remember, you can catch a new episode of the Interview right here tomorrow. Lulu talks with Rosé, a member of the group Blackpink, about her new solo album and the intense training process required to become a K-pop star. I felt like we were trained to always present ourselves in the most perfect, perfect way in making sure

that I'm a perfect girl for everyone. Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Pat McCusker and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.