House Ethics report describes alleged sex with underage girl

The House Ethics Committee On Monday, it announced that it had found “substantial evidence” that former Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl in 2017 and that he “regularly” paid women for sex while he was in Congress was.

The board, in a Final report During its years-long investigation against Gaetz, the court also got here to the conclusion that he had consumed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on several occasions between 2017 and 2019.

Gaetz also accepted gifts, including a visit to the Bahamas in 2018, “that exceeded the allowable amounts,” the bipartisan committee concluded.

“Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that discredits the House of Representatives,” the 42-page report said.

The committee said it found “substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz has violated House rules, state and federal laws and other standards of conduct, engaging in prostitution, statutory rape, illegal drug use, accepting improper gifts, and granting special favors and privileges.” and prohibit obstruction.” of Congress.”

But the committee said it found insufficient evidence that Gaetz violated a federal sex trafficking law, although he did “arrange for the transportation of women across state lines for the purpose of commercial sex.” The panel said it found no evidence that these women were under 18 on the time of the trip and couldn’t conclude that the “commercial sexual acts were induced by force, fraud or coercion.”

Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.

A lawyer for Gaetz didn’t immediately reply to CNBC's request for comment on the report. When the report was published, Gaetz denied in a series of posts on X that he had engaged in prostitution or sex trafficking.

“There's a reason they did this to me in a report on Christmas Eve and not in a courtroom where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses,” Gaetz wrote in a post.

Hours before the long-awaited report got here out, Gaetz asked a federal judge to issue one interim injunction that might block its publication.

The ethics panel report, the ultimate product of an investigation that began in 2021, has been at the middle of a recent controversy surrounding the previous Florida lawmaker.

Gaetz, 42, resigned from Congress in mid-November, shortly after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him to be U.S. attorney general. Trump's nomination to go the Justice Department was immediately met with excitement from critics, who were quick to notice that if confirmed, Gaetz would take over as head of the agency that had previously investigated him over sex trafficking allegations.

The Justice Department ended that investigation without filing criminal charges. But the Ethics Commission, which had paused its own efforts while the DOJ's version emerged, reauthorized its investigation in May 2023.

As Gaetz left Congress, Republicans, including ethics Rep. Michael Guest of Mississippi, said Gaetz was not inside the committee's jurisdiction, raising doubts about whether his report can be released publicly.

News agencies reported At the time, Gaetz's departure got here just two days before the ethics panel was set to vote on releasing the report. The panel, made up of an equal variety of Democrats and Republicans, disagreed on whether the report ought to be made public, despite the fact that Gaetz isn’t any longer a congressman.

But in a secret vote on December 10, the committee decided that the report ought to be made public.

Gaetz withdrew his bid for attorney general after just eight days as Trump's pick, saying he would “unfairly distract” the Republican president-elect's transition efforts.

His decision, which followed reports that quite a few Republican senators wouldn’t support Gaetz's confirmation, was the primary major setback to Trump's efforts to staff his Cabinet.

As more of Trump's proposals prepare for senators' consideration in the approaching weeks, the contents of the Gaetz report could undermine senators' confidence within the Trump transition team's vetting process.

Between 2017 and 2020, Gaetz paid tens of hundreds of dollars to women “that the committee determined were likely related to sexual activity and/or drug use,” the report said.

That amount also includes money spent at a celebration on July 15, 2017, where “records overwhelmingly indicate that Rep. Gaetz had sex with multiple women … including the then-17-year-old,” it says Report.

Gaetz, then 35, and the underage girl had sex twice at that party, including at the very least once in front of others, the report said. The girl, known as “Victim A,” said she remembered Gaetz giving her $400 as payment for sex that evening, the report said.

“At that time, she had just completed her freshman year of high school,” the report said.

Gaetz's previous claim that he had not had sex with a 17-year-old “since I was 17” was unfaithful, the committee concluded.

His “statutory rape of Victim A constituted a violation of Florida law, the Code of Conduct and the Code of Ethics for Government Service,” the report said.

The committee said it found evidence that Gaetz didn’t learn the victim's age until a month after they’d sex. But “statutory rape is a strict liability crime,” the report said, referring to crimes that don’t require proof of intent for conviction. The panel found that Gaetz met with the girl again for industrial sex lower than six months later, after she turned 18.

The Gaetz investigation included 29 subpoenas, nearly 14,000 documents, greater than two dozen witnesses, six Freedom of Information Act requests and nine other requests for information, the report said.

The committee said it received written communications from a Gaetz associate, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector in Seminole County, Florida, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to federal crimes including sex trafficking of an underage girl. Greenberg was sentenced 11 years in prison in 2022.

Gaetz and Greenberg — who met and have become friends shortly after Gaetz was sworn into Congress in January 2017 — continuously attended parties with young women Greenberg had contacted through a “sugar dating” website, the report said.

Greenberg said he and Gaetz, who didn’t have his own account on the location, would split the price of “medication and hotel.”[s]and girls.”

The committee said that while Greenberg had “credibility issues,” none of his findings were based solely on the data he provided.