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Tag: investigation
Matt Gaetz

'Matt Showed This To Me': Gaetz Allegedly Displayed Nude Pics Of Young Women

Even though the US Department of Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) last year, the House Ethics Committee is still investigating him. And a new profile suggests that investigation may soon intensify.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic's Elaine Godfrey reported that, according to several of her sources, the Florida Republican sent explicit photos and videos of women to some of his colleagues in Congress. One video was allegedly of a young woman hula hooping while naked.

"Matt sent this to me, and you’re missing out," one unnamed Gaetz aide said, telling Godfrey that he watched the video from the back of a fan along with another member of Congress.

According to Godfrey, Gaetz has a longtime habit of "bragging about his sexual conquests" that supposedly includes showing nude photos of women to his friends. One of Gaetz's longtime friends, Erin Scot, recalled a time when she met up with Gaetz at a wedding in 2009 — prior to him launching his political career — and wanted to show him a photo of her girlfriend (Scot came out as lesbian to Gaetz when they were young, and she noted that she felt comfortable with him when he appeared unfazed at the news).

"[Scot] says that later, at the bar, Gaetz passed around an image of his own: a cellphone photo of a recent hookup, staring up topless from his bed," Godfrey wrote.

The far-right congressman allegedly took his public boasting about his hookups to a higher level after being elected to the Florida legislature in 2010. Godfrey wrote that Gaetz and several Republican lawmakers are reported to have devised a "points" system in which participants scored one point for sleeping with a lobbyist, three points for hooking up with a lawmaker and six points for a married legislator. The Washington Post reported in 2021 that Gaetz voted against a Florida bill to criminalize "revenge porn," which involves the sharing of explicit photos without the consent of the subject.

"Gaetz and his friends all played the game, at least three people confirmed to me, although none could tell me exactly where Gaetz stood on the scoreboard. (Gaetz has denied creating, having knowledge of, or participating in the game.)," Godfrey reported.

A source Godfrey described as a "former Republican lawmaker" corroborated other claims about Gaetz's propensity to share unsolicited details about his sex life. That source said Gaetz "used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend.

"He’d show me a video, and I’d say, 'That’s great, Matt.’ Like, what kind of a reaction do you want?" The source said.

And while Gaetz was once a close adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, reportedly being the reason former President Donald Trump endorsed DeSantis' candidacy for his first term in 2018, he has since fallen out of favor with the Sunshine State's governor. Political consultant Peter Schorch told Godfrey that Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis "hated all the sex stories that came out" about Gaetz and that the congressman was to be considered "persona non grata."

The House Ethics Committee's probe into Gaetz is ongoing, and will ultimately product a report that could recommend an official censure motion or even expulsion, as it did with former Rep. George Santos (R-NY). Gaetz continues to deny all of the allegations the committee is investigating.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

James Comer

Raskin: Oversight Chair Worked With Trump Lawyers To Kill Tax Probe

House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer is putting up a perfect display of Republican priorities, and Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, is on the case.

On the one hand, Comer is not only dropping an agreement with Mazars, the longtime accounting firm for Donald Trump, to produce documents relating to foreign government spending at Trump properties during Trump’s time in the White House—he’s coordinating with Trump’s lawyers about the move. And at the same time, Comer is broadening his investigation into Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden and someone with no government role whatsoever, to demand banking records for three of Hunter Biden’s business associates.

Pointing out that documents Mazars already turned over to the committee show hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from governments including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and China to Trump’s businesses, Raskin wrote, in a letter to Comer, “On January 19, 2023, Patrick Strawbridge, counsel for Donald Trump, wrote to counsel for Mazars, stating ‘I do not know the status of Mazars [sic] production, but my understanding is that the Committee has no interest in forcing Mazars to complete it and is willing to release it from further obligations under the settlement agreement.’”

Raskin continued, “When counsel for Mazars sought clarification, Mr. Strawbridge confirmed this direction had been provided to him, twice, by the Acting General Counsel of the House of Representatives, in his capacity as counsel to the Committee.” This is, Raskin wrote, “an astonishing delegation of the legislative power of the Chair to a twice-impeached former President whose Executive Branch actions are still actively under Committee investigation.”

At the same time, Comer subpoenaed Bank of America seeking 14 years of financial records for three of Hunter Biden’s business associates. This isn’t just records of a specific business. It was a demand for “all financial records” from the moment Joe Biden became vice president until now.

“These documents go well beyond any business deal with Hunter Biden or CEFC,” Raskin wrote. “They intrude into private details of Mr. Walker’s and his family’s finances: how much he pays for his child’s dance lessons, when he has been to the hospital, how many parking tickets he has paid, how often he eats at Papa John’s or has coffee at Starbucks, and how much he spends on groceries at Safeway.”

To House Republicans, Walker’s participation with Hunter Biden in a failed business venture makes this information a more legitimate target for investigation than evidence of foreign governments spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump properties. As Raskin accurately summed up, “I fear this wildly overbroad subpoena suggests that your interest in this investigation is not in pursuing defined facts or informing public legislation but conducting a dragnet of political opposition research on behalf of former President Trump.”

So: Information on how a former president and would-be future president profited, while in office, from foreign government spending is not of interest to the Republicans in control of the House Oversight Committee.

But: Detailed personal financial records of the business associates of a person who is not in the government are at the center of what these Republicans are doing.

It’s obviously partisan—Republicans want to investigate Democrats and end investigations of Republicans—but it’s more than that. The difference in the closeness to power of what and who is under investigation is telling. It’s the guy who was in the White House vs. people who did business with the son of the guy in the White House, with no reason, despite multiple investigations, to believe that the president has had any involvement in his son’s business dealings, let alone steered U.S. policy in directions favorable to his son.

Comer and his Republican buddies would like voters to believe that, wow, if they’re demanding financial records of people who just did business with Hunter Biden, there must be a there there. But the reality is that what it shows is that they have nothing on the president. If they even thought they did, they’d be investigating him.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Big Majority Believes Asking Foreign Power For Election Help Is ‘Wrong’

Big Majority Believes Asking Foreign Power For Election Help Is ‘Wrong’

More than 4 in 5 Americans (81 percent) say asking foreign governments for help in an election is wrong, according to a new Grinnell College poll released Tuesday.

The results are the same or higher among Trump’s political base.

The same poll shows 81 percent of Republicans, 85 percent of evangelical Christians, and 87 percent of rural voters agree that it is wrong to ask for such assistance.

The poll is in line with other national polls showing similar public sentiment. In a late July Quinnipiac poll, 78 percent of voters agreed with the statement that “it is never acceptable for a presidential campaign to obtain information on a political opponent from a hostile foreign power.”

In a mid-October poll from the University of Maryland, 68 percent of respondents said a president asking foreign leaders to interfere in a U.S. election was an impeachable offense.

The questions come amid an ongoing impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives, focused on Donald Trump’s actions with regard to Ukraine. Trump has been criticized for his efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his 2020 election rival Joe Biden, as well as a long-debunked conspiracy theory about the DNC servers.

Several officials have also claimed Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine, conditioning that assistance on Ukraine’s willingness to launch such an investigation. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney admitted to a quid pro quo for the DNC information earlier this month before trying to walk back his remarks later.

While a majority of Americans are clear-eyed about the impropriety of seeking foreign interference, several Republican senators have struggled to reach that same conclusion.

In early October, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO) was asked repeatedly if it was appropriate for a president to ask a foreign government to investigate a political rival. Gardner refused to say yes or no.

Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) reacted similarly, refusing to answer a simple question about the issue, as did Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

As Republicans continue to hedge on the issue or avoid it altogether, Americans more broadly seem to have more concrete opinions on the matter. Polls show the public increasingly likely to support impeachment as the House inquiry continues, with one survey showing more support for Trump’s impeachment than for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment back in 1998.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

The Trump Administration Serves Nobody But Trump

The Trump Administration Serves Nobody But Trump

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s press briefing this week contained, as I have argued, a stunning amount of confessions of wrongdoing — but it was also highlighted of a deeper truth about President Donald Trump’s administration.

It stripped away the pretense of the administration being aimed at furthering the national interest. Under the Trump administration, the federal government aims to serve Trump — and Trump alone.

This was clear when Mulvaney announced that the United States would be hosting the upcoming G7 summit at his own resort in Miami, Florida, pouring money directly into his private hands from both the U.S. and foreign governments. It’s a brazen violation of the Constitution and any basic sense of decency, but that doesn’t matter in the Trump administration. It doesn’t matter that, when the Trump first floated the idea of holding the G7 at his own property, there were deafening howls decrying the idea as openly corrupt.

Mulvaney said that it didn’t matter that this would have the appearance of a conflict of interest because Trump was willing to “take the hit.” Of course, he said nothing about why the American people or the U.S. government should have to “take the hit” of the stain of corruption for a choice that accrues only to Trump’s personal benefit.

But that doesn’t matter, of course, if all the matters to the Trump administration is Trump.

In Mulvaney’s more explosive remarks, admitting that there was a quid pro quo at the heart of the Ukraine scandal, the chief of staff showed how much he has internalized the attitude that Trump’s interests are all that matter. He later lied and said that the media “misconstrued” his confirmation of the quid pro quo — which was obvious, regardless — but the truth is he just felt so emboldened by the ideology of the administration that he thought he could get away with the admission. He forgot that, to best defend Trump’s interests, he has to pretend that Trump cares about the country.

Defending the quid pro quo, Mulvaney went even further:

[A former State Department employee] said yesterday that he was really upset with the political influence in foreign policy. That was one of the reasons he was so upset about this. And I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.

…

That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. And foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration.

And what you’re seeing now, I believe, is a group of mostly career bureaucrats who are saying, “You know what? I don’t like President Trump’s politics, so I’m going to participate in this witch hunt that they’re undertaking on the Hill.” Elections do have consequences and they should. And your foreign policy is going to change. Obama did it in one way; we’re doing it a different way. And there’s no problem with that.

Here, Mulvaney blended together two meanings of the word “political.” Of course, all foreign policy is “political” in the sense that it’s conducted by politicians and affected by elections. But the criticism of Trump’s Ukraine scandal as “political” means that the quid pro quo was done for the president’s own, personal political interests at winning re-election. And it wasn’t in the traditional way politicians might do this, by achieving a foreign policy success to impress voters, but by using the U.S. government’s foreign policy clout and apparatus to induce another country to go after Trump’s political rivals. It’s easy for Mulvaney to blend these two meanings together, though, because in the Trump administration, Trump’s personal interests are all that matter. There’s no greater national interest that he cares about.

“Get over it.”

That’s why, of course, some State Department employees — particularly the career officials — have complied with the impeachment inquiry over the administration’s objections. They signed up to serve the United States, but Trump only wants them to serve Trump.

Of course, the merger of Trump’s narrow interests and the administration’s priorities extends to other departments. The Justice Department has been repeatedly roped into arguing for Trump’s interests in a range of lawsuits, sometimes to absurd effect. For instance, when people sued Trump for blocking them on Twitter, the DOJ defended the president; but the argument it made that Trump was allowed to block people on Twitter because he was acting in his personal capacity, rather than as president. Why, then, should the DOJ have bothered defending him at all if he was acting in his personal capacity? It only makes sense if the administration only Trump’s personal interests. But notice, a seemingly similar claim is certainly not accepted by the administration: Trump’s interests are not identical with the United States’ interests.

We also know that the Justice Department reviewed allegations against Trump related to the Ukraine scandal when they were first reported internally, but no criminal investigation was opened. Why should it have been? Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney Rod Rosenstein, charges against the president could be taken seriously; under Attorney General Bill Barr, they can be dismissed out of hand.

That’s not to say nothing ever happens in the administration that ever goes against Trump’s interest anymore. The Justice Department also indicted two of Rudy Giuliani’s associates, which may prove detrimental to Trump in the Ukraine Scandal. But when these seemingly rarer events occur, they seem to be going against the grain. The trend in the administration is for more and more of the government’s efforts to be consumed by Trump’s needs, even as lower-level officials continue to try to do their jobs as intended.

Consider that when Trump made a minor slip up and said, falsely, that a hurricane was headed toward Alabama, and he refused to back down — the Commerce Department jumped in to defend him. The branch of the National Weather Service that had done its job and debunked the president’s false claims was publicly admonished by the top brass in the department, sacrificing the U.S. government’s precious credibility at the altar of Trump’s vanity.

Vice President Mike Pence, too, gets roped into promoting Trump’s narrow interests. When he went to Ireland, he stayed at Trump’s own property — once again, putting government funds directly into the president’s pocket. This certainly wasn’t in Pence’s interest, because it only served to tarnish his own reputation with Trump’s corruption. But that fact, too — binding the vice president’s fate to his own — likely proves useful to Trump.

Pence has further set his credibility ablaze just to help Trump. He’s been enmeshed in the Ukraine scandal, and he was sent to Turkey this week to try to undo the atrocity Trump unleashed by pulling U.S. forces out of northern Syria. Pence announced a supposed “ceasefire” between the Turks and the Kurds — which Trump touted as a massive victory — but Turkey denied that it was a ceasefire at all, and it resumed its assault on Friday. Pretending the supposed “ceasefire” was more than it was did nothing to help anyone besides Trump, who is desperate to convince his voters that, despite what members of his own party say, his decision in Syria wasn’t a complete disaster.

Of course, presidents will always try to use the power of their office to boost their own fortunes in ways that are more and less appropriate, and the Trump administration didn’t invent U.S. government corruption. But Trump’s own exaggerated impulses and inflated sense of himself had taken this feature of the U.S. system to new lows — and it may take us a long time to recover.