Senators from both parties want to see the House Ethics Committee's report on recently departed Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz before they vote on his nomination to lead President-elect Donald Trump’s Justice Department as attorney general.
Gaetz, who resigned on Wednesday after Trump tapped him for the job, was once subject to a federal sex trafficking investigation that began during Trump’s first term under then-Attorney General Bill Barr. Though that probe ended without charges and Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing, the House Committee on Ethics was examining a series of allegations involving sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and misused campaign funds.
“The lawful, consensual, sexual activities of adults are not the business of Congress,” Gaetz wrote in a letter to the committee in September, denying all accusations.
The House investigation effectively ended with Gaetz’s sudden resignation on Wednesday, with some reports indicating the committee’s conclusions were days away from being made public. But now senators from both parties, including key Republicans in the incoming 53-seat Senate majority, and an attorney for a woman who has alleged Gaetz of having an inappropriate relationship with her while she was in high school have said the report should be made available to the public or, at the very least, the senators who will decide if he is confirmed to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said “I think it’s going to be material in the proceedings.” Texas Sen. John Cornyn told reporters on Thursday that “I think there should not be any limitation on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation, including whatever the House Ethics Committee has generated,” adding he “absolutely” wants to see the report.
“I don’t know Mr. Gaetz from Adam, so I’ve read about press reports and that sort of thing, but I’d rather get the information myself,” said Cornyn, a Republican member of the Judiciary panel who narrowly lost a vote on Wednesday to South Dakota Sen. John Thune to lead the Senate GOP. For his part, Thune said on Thursday he “haven’t given that any thought” when asked by reporters if the House ethics probe should be made public.
The House Ethics Committee is the lower chamber’s sole bipartisan panel, meaning it is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats with a chair from the majority party — currently Mississippi Republican Rep. Michael Guest — and staff hired to be nonpartisan. One of its responsibilities is “investigating and adjudicating any alleged violations of the House rules or any related statutes by House Members, officers, or employees.”
Guest has said that with Gaetz gone, his committee no longer has jurisdiction to keep investigating nor the authority to publish a report. But the left-leaning nonprofit group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, also known as CREW, urged the committee to publicly release its findings, arguing there is precedent for doing so even after a lawmaker has left office. CREW chief counsel Donald Sherman, who once served as a counsel to the House Ethics Committee, cited examples from 2010 and 2011 in a letter to Guest and other committee members.
In another example, the committee released a report two months after a Tennessee Democrat in the House resigned in 1987 amid allegations of financial improprieties.
The committee had been investigating allegations that Gaetz was part of a scheme that led to the sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl, shared inappropriate images or videos with colleagues on the House floor, or that he accepted a bribe or converted campaign funds to personal use. The federal criminal investigation that ended in 2023 without charges focused on allegations that Gaetz and onetime political ally Joel Greenberg paid underage girls and escorts or offered them gifts in exchange for sex.
Greenberg, a fellow Republican who served as the tax collector in Florida’s Seminole County, admitted as part of a plea deal with prosecutors in 2021 that he paid women and an underage girl to have sex with him and other men. The men were not identified in court documents when he pleaded guilty. Greenberg was sentenced in late 2022 to 11 years in prison.
On Thursday, John Clune -- a Colorado-based attorney representing a woman who says she had an inappropriate relationship with Gaetz while she was still in high school -- called the Florida lawmaker’s nomination “a perverse development in a truly dark series of events” and called on the House Ethics Committee to release their report “immediately.”
“She was a high school student and there were witnesses,” he wrote on social media.
Top Republicans have publicly accused Gaetz of the alleged misconduct, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin.
“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 [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night,” said Mullin, a former GOP House member, in October 2023. “So when that [sexual misconduct] accusation came out, no one defended him.”
Gaetz called those claims “a lie” and has denied wrongdoing across the board. On Wednesday, Mullin went on CNN to say he “completely” trusts Trump’s decision-making in regards to selecting Gaetz to be attorney general.
Speaking with Punchbowl News on Thursday, Cornyn framed his interest in the House report as partly “to protect the president” from “information that the investigation would find forthcoming that would ultimately be an embarrassment to the president.”
Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist Republican who has bucked Trump in the past, said the president-elect “has the right to nominate whomever he wishes,” but that she’s “sure that there will be many, many questions raised at Mr. Gaetz’s hearing if in fact the nomination goes forward." Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, another centrist, told CBS News she was concerned by “the number of open investigations that are out there.” North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer called the nomination a “Hail Mary” pass from Trump that will require “a lot of political capital” and said he didn’t like the way Gaetz led a revolt in the House that ultimately ended McCarthy’s speakership.
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, owned by right-wing media mogul and Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch and his influential family, cited the McCarthy feud in a Wednesday column titled “Matt Gaetz Is a Bad Choice for Attorney General.”
Outgoing Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin, D-Ill., called for the House Ethics Committee “to preserve and share their report and all relevant documentation” with his committee. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Ct., said he believes there’s between five and 10 Republican senators who would vote against Gaetz’s confirmation. The GOP is set to hold a 53-47 majority, meaning Trump can only afford to lose three votes on a given nomination if every senator in the Democratic caucus votes ‘no.’
But Trump’s closest allies were quick to defend Gaetz, indicating the president-elect may not walk back the surprising pick despite the growing resistance from within his own party. Vice President-elect JD Vance, the Ohio senator, contrasted Gaetz with the Biden administration’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, arguing the sitting attorney general prosecuted his political opponents and harassed “parents who were peacefully protesting at school board meetings,” two claims that lack merit.
"Generally speaking, I vote for confirmation regardless of party or personal feelings because that is my Constitutional role as a Senator. I will do the same for President Trump’s nominees," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said in a statement speaking broadly about Trump’s appointees to his next administration.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville warned his fellow Republicans on Fox News on Wednesday that if defected from Gaetz or other nominees, “we’re going to try to get you out of the Senate if you do that.”
Some Trump boosters, including the president-elect himself, have floated a process known as “recess appointments” to circumvent the traditional Senate confirmation process. The Constitution allows presidents to fill otherwise Senate-confirmable vacancies during a Senate recess, but the Supreme Court effectively halted the practice during the Obama administration and the legal framework for restarting the process is unclear.
Thune, the newly elected Senate GOP leader, said he wants nominees to go through the regular process, but left the door open to recess appointments after Trump said it was a prerequisite for any new leader in Congress’ upper chamber. Gaetz is not alone among Trump’s nominees facing a potentially bumpy path, with former Democratic House Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination director of national intelligence, Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense and anti-vaccine proponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 's nomination for health and human services secretary all expected to face resistance among Republican senators.
“Like President Trump, Matt Gaetz has been a victim of the weaponized Department of Justice. And one of the promises President Trump made to the American people was to root out the corruption at the DOJ,” Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News on Thursday. “Matt Gaetz and President Trump are going to put an end to that. That’s what the American people want. That’s why they elected him.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.