By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2024-11-18 21:51:14 | Updated at 2024-11-19 00:31:13
2 hours ago
An attorney representing two women who testified before the House Committee on Ethics about Attorney General-designate Matt Gaetz said Monday that both his clients stated under oath that the former Republican congressman paid them for sex — and one saw him in flagrante delicto with a 17-year-old.
Orlando-based attorney Joel Leppard told ABC News that the ethics committee cross-checked his clients’ stories with Gaetz’s Venmo records, obtained via subpoena.
“They essentially put the Venmo payments on the screen and asked about them,” Leppard told the outlet. “And my clients repeatedly testified, ‘What was this payment for?’ ‘That was for sex.'”
Both women were adults when the alleged transactions took place. However, one of Leppard’s clients gave more damaging testimony against Gaetz, who resigned from Congress Nov. 13 — hours after President-elect Trump tapped him as the top US law enforcement official.
“She testified [that] in July of 2017, at this house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Rep. Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was 17,” Leppard recounted to ABC News.
The age of consent in Florida, the Panhandle of which Gaetz represented in Congress for nearly eight full years, is 18.
However, Leppard added that his client told the committee that “her understanding was that Matt Gaetz did not know that [the 17-year-old] was a minor, and that when he learned that she was a minor, that he broke off things and did not continue a sexual relationship until she turned 18.”
The lawyer’s statement came two days before the ethics committee is due to meet, possibly to discuss what to do with a report compiled from its investigation of Gaetz for offenses including sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and sharing inappropriate images on the House floor.
Gaetz has denied wrongdoing and his resignation left the ethics investigation in limbo, since the panel has no jurisdiction over former members of Congress.
But senators from both parties have implored the committee to release its report on Gaetz to better guide their decision-making on his nomination.
Colorado-based attorney John Clune, believed to be representing the former 17-year-old, also demanded lawmakers release the report, stating on X: “Gaetz’s likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events … She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has opposed the public release of the report, calling it a “terrible precedent to set.”
“Someone who is no longer a member of Congress, we are not in the business of investigating and publishing a report of people who are not a part of this institution,” the speaker told reporters Friday. “The ethics committee’s jurisdiction is for sitting members of Congress.”
Meanwhile, Trump, 78, is sticking with his pick to helm the Justice Department.
“Matt Gaetz will be the next Attorney General. He’s the right man for the job and will end the weaponization of our justice system,” Trump transition spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer told The Post.
“These are baseless allegations intended to derail the second Trump administration. The Biden Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years and cleared him of wrongdoing. The only people who went to prison over these allegations were those lying about Matt Gaetz.”
Gaetz has long had a scandalous reputation in Washington, even after marrying his wife Ginger in 2021.
In October 2023, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), who served with Gaetz for six years in the House of Representatives, told CNN: “We had all seen the videos he was showing … on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.”
Gaetz is perhaps most famous for spearheading the mutiny against former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in October 2023.
At the time, the then-congressman claimed the revolt was motivated by his dismay that McCarthy took up a temporary spending patch, something the lower chamber has done almost half a dozen times since.
McCarthy alleged that Gaetz wanted him to intervene in the ethics investigation, something the latter denied. Back in June, the panel released a rare public statement confirming it was still investigating the Floridian.
It was initially revealed in April 2021 that the Ethics Committee was investigating Gaetz, though that was later put on ice during a Justice Department investigation of claims the lawmaker paid minors to travel across state lines for sex.
Ultimately, the DOJ declined to pursue charges and the committee reportedly resumed its efforts in May of last year.
A friend of Gaetz, former Seminole County tax commissioner Joel Greenberg, entered a plea agreement in May 2021 confessing to recruiting women for paid sex — at least one of whom was underage. He had fessed up to paying them over $70,000 between 2016 and 2018.
Later that year, Stephen Alford, a Florida businessman, pleaded guilty to a wire fraud charge related to a scheme in which he attempted to extort $25 million from Gaetz’s father — a former Florida Senate president — by pledging to lock down a pardon for the then-congressman.
