Here Is How Matt Gaetz Is Pitching Himself to Senators

The beleaguered Trump AG nominee is trying to calm the nerves of jittery senators by stressing he won’t be out for revenge.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

MATT GAETZ’S FIRST ROUND OF MEETINGS with Senate Republicans included an unexpected pitch for how he will comport himself as attorney general, should he get their votes: He’s not thirsting for retribution at the Department of Justice, he told the lawmakers. 

“Look, I’m not going to go there and indict Liz Cheney, have storm troopers bust through the studio door at MSNBC, and arrest Anthony Fauci in my first week,” Gaetz told some senators in his one-on-one meetings, according to two people familiar with his remarks who relayed them to The Bulwark.

It’s that last clause—“in my first week”—that sounded like an ominous disclaimer to some. And it prompted a few senators to ask, with a laugh: What happens thereafter?

“We’re not doing that,” Donald Trump’s AG nominee then said, according to those people. “We’re breaking the cycle of weaponizing DOJ.”

Gaetz’s pledge to reform, not torch, the DOJ, requires a fair bit of trust and faith, as it runs against other pledges from Trump world operatives to systematically undo and weaponize the department that they believe was used to target their boss. But as the beleaguered former congressman tries to muster the needed fifty votes for confirmation, he is taking carefully calibrated steps to calm the nerves of jittery Senate Republicans. 

Gaetz has spent time discussing staffing and proposing policy to try to reorient the conversation away from the investigation of the past and on to his plans for the future. In addition to saying he’ll limit political prosecutions, Gaetz presented four areas he wants to focus on at DOJ that are appealing to conservatives: 

• implementing Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and the mass deportation of the undocumented;

• increasing investigations of antisemitism, expanding voter fraud investigations, and limiting the Civil Rights Division in fighting states like Virginia from removing ineligible voters;

• increasing DOJ investigations and prosecutions related to the trafficking of fentanyl precursor chemicals from China; and

• ending pressure on social media companies to remove content they have deemed misinformation and disinformation.

But Gaetz’s confirmation still might be too difficult to swallow for many senators. Democrats and a fair number of Republicans have expressed concerns about Gaetz’s judgment, his morals, and whether he would exact revenge on the very agency that spent more than three years investigating him over allegations of sex trafficking a minor.

Gaetz has denied the allegations and the DOJ’s investigation into the matter resulted in no charges. But the context of the investigation raised deep questions about his character and left a parade of horrible headlines that damaged his reputation. 

The absence of charges also didn’t mean that Gaetz had been put in the clear, at least politically. The House Ethics Committee has also been investigating the matter based on the same accusations and witnesses. Gaetz’s abrupt resignation from the House last week effectively put an end to that query. And on Wednesday, lawmakers on the committee declined to release their findings, though they will meet again in early December on the matter. 

Top Republicans have tried to keep the Ethics Committee’s report confidential. Gaetz, meanwhile, has made the fact that the Justice Department declined to prosecute him a central component of his case to Senate Republicans. 

“There’s no there, there,” Gaetz told Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a member of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, who relayed the account to The Bulwark.

---

SENSING THAT GAETZ MIGHT NEED to change the dynamics and trajectory of his confirmation process, some in Trump world want the congressman to call for the release of the report and face the matter head on. The usually omnipresent ex-congressman has been notably absent from public view since his nomination was made public. Some allies believe he would be better served doing what he does best: political knifefighting. 

Lee said that call is “up to him. That’s not my judgment call to make. It wouldn’t surprise me if he ended up calling for it.”

Another Judiciary Committee member, John Cornyn (R-Texas), indicated that the report will surface one way or another.

“Everything’s going to come out,” Cornyn told CNN.

Gaetz, for now, is trying to win over lawmakers with a more carrots than sticks approach. He plans to meet with each member of the Judiciary Committee over the next two days alongside Vice President-elect JD Vance. The Ohio senator is well-regarded in the GOP conference. Trump himself is also lobbying senators.

Lee said that Gaetz asked the committee “just give me a fair shake.” The senator said he approved of the way Gaetz “didn’t go in there saying, ‘I want revenge and retribution’. . . . I suspect that a lot of my colleagues might assume that his first order of business is revenge, and I don’t think it is.”

But it’s not easy to convince skeptical lawmakers that Gaetz, as AG, won’t use the Justice Department as a prosecutorial tool for Trump’s political discretion. And beyond that, he faces lingering questions about the sex-trafficking probe and the salacious allegations against him. Elements of the House ethics report have been dripping out for days: that he had sex with the 17-year-old at a friend’s house in 2017, that it was witnessed by her friend, and that he paid her for sex as well as other women at drug-filled orgies.

Conservative figures and influencers have begun rallying to Gaetz’s side, calling the investigation a four-year smear and pointing out that federal prosecutors found the witnesses against Gaetz had credibility problems.

The alleged victim pretended she was 18 when she began engaging in prostitution with a former friend of Gaetz. That friend, former Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, was ultimately imprisoned for sex trafficking her as a minor. He committed a variety of other crimes that included falsely smearing a political foe as a pedophile. The woman who claimed she saw the alleged victim have sex with Gaetz when she was 17 also faces allegations she sex trafficked the minor.

Exactly what’s in the report is unclear. The committee’s decision on Wednesday to not release the findings came via a party-line vote, outraging Democrats, who called on the FBI to release its files on its criminal investigation.

Meanwhile, the FBI has been asked to investigate another matter related to the Gaetz case: an alleged hack of a computer system of a law firm representing the Greenberg family in a separate civil defamation lawsuit brought against them by Gaetz’s friend Chris Dorworth. The hacked records included confidential documents under seal from the federal investigation.

“Because of the nature and the timing of the breach, we are concerned that this may have been a malicious public actor, either foreign or domestic, with a vested interest in subverting and interfering with President Trump’s selection of Congressman Matt Gaetz as U.S. Attorney General,” Dorworth’s lawyer, Florida state Rep. Alex Andrade, wrote in a letter obtained Wednesday by The Bulwark. 

Gaetz has publicly denied the claims but he acknowledges he had given money over the years to various “girlfriends,” as he described them. And, in meetings with the senators, he admitted that he led a libertine lifestyle while he was single and that details of his past sex life involving multiple women are “embarrassing.”  

But some of the women who were adults at the time told House investigators they were not in relationships but were paid for sex, according to ABC News.

And though Trump had a historic comeback win that helped deliver Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, Gaetz’s confirmation remains deeply in doubt, even among Trump advisers who support him.

“The chances aren’t 50-50,” said one adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But they’re not 90-10.”

Asked about Gaetz’s chances, Sen. Lee said that “time will tell.”

“Nobody can predict the future,” Lee said, “but we have seen in other contexts, when somebody has been widely criticized in social media and in the media with allegations that turned out not to be corroborated, not to be credible, or—in some instances—demonstrably false. And that’s yet another reason for us to schedule a hearing so that we can address this.”