A House Ethics Committee investigation into Matt Gaetz.
An explosive report on Matt Gaetz
The House Ethics Committee said that its lengthy investigation into Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump’s onetime pick for attorney general, found that he had regularly paid for sex and used illegal drugs. He was also accused of having paid for sexual relations in 2017 with a 17-year-old girl.
The report, released yesterday, concluded that Gaetz’s actions violated state sexual misconduct laws in Florida, which Gaetz formerly represented in Congress.
The laws include Florida’s statutory rape law, though the report did not find conclusive evidence that he had violated federal sex trafficking laws. It was released weeks after Gaetz withdrew from consideration to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Read the main takeaways here.
Gaetz has denied wrongdoing. He mounted a last-ditch effort to block the report’s release yesterday, filing an emergency motion in Federal District Court, but he was notified that he had filed it improperly. On social media, he argued that he was being unfairly maligned by a “sham witch-hunt report.”
In other U.S. political news:
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President Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 federal prisoners, all of whom remain subject to life imprisonment. He declined to commute the sentences of three others.
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Donald Trump has suggested in recent days that he wants to bring Greenland and the Panama Canal under American control.
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Bill Clinton, 78, was hospitalized in Washington for testing and observation after developing a fever.
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