Ethics Committee Will Not Release Gaetz Report

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) seemed to have avoided a major hurdle in his quest to become Donald Trump’s attorney general.

The House Ethics Committee had just voted on whether it should release its report publicly.

The committee was unable to agree, so the report would stay sealed, appearing to give Gaetz a big win.

Gonna Go

I am among those who believe that, at the very least, the report should have been given to the Senate Judiciary Committee charged with vetting the AG nominee.

I don’t personally need to see what the report was, but if there was something in there that could come back to bite Trump, I would absolutely prefer to have it come out now and derail the nomination rather than later and hurt the administration.

When the committee voted on releasing the report, the vote was split along party lines, so the report will not be released.

Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) stated, "We just concluded a two-hour meeting of the ethics committee, and it was not my intention to make any comment. I walked out of this committee without making one and walked back to my office.

"We had agreed that we were not going to discuss what had transpired at the meeting. But it has come to my attention that the Chairman has since betrayed the process by disclosing our deliberations within moments after walking out of the committee, and he has implied that there was an agreement of the committee not to disclose the report."

She continued, "I'd say that a vote was taken. As many of you know, this committee is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, five Dems, five Republicans, which means that in order to affirmatively move something forward, somebody has to cross party lines and vote with the other side – which happens a lot, by the way, and we often vote unanimously. That did not happen in today's vote.”

As is turns out, this was all for naught because Gaetz withdrew his nomination on Thursday.

In announcing his withdrawal, Gaetz stated that he had become a major distraction for the incoming administration, which he did not want to be.

He was adamant that Trump needed his AG in place on Day One, so he would withdraw and allow Trump to nominate someone else.

The early money is on Trump nominating one of his personal attorneys or picking from a handful of red-state AGs, such as Andrew Bailey, who have been fiercely loyal to Trump.