The House Ethics Committee voted not to release its incomplete report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who recently resigned from Congress after President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to nominate him as attorney general.
Despite calls for the report to be published, the committee remains divided. Some members are pushing for the document’s release, while others are pushing for it, violating the precedent that such reports should only be released to those who are still members of Congress.
“There is no committee approval to release the report,” Ethics Chairman Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters after a roughly two-hour meeting.
The panel, which met behind closed doors, took several votes, a source familiar with the situation told The Hill, including one to release the report as is, which failed, and another to release only the published exhibits associated with the report, which also failed, and a third to officially “complete” the report, which passed on a bipartisan basis.
The development caps a week of speculation about the committee’s work, with lawmakers on both sides pushing for its release, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) forcefully advocating for the work to remain secret and Trump’s team pushing the work forward Selection of Gaetz despite the drama.
According to Rep. Susan Wild (Pa.), the top Democrat on the panel, the committee is scheduled to meet again on Dec. 5 “to further consider this matter.”
Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) confirmed that “a vote has taken place” and noted that “this committee is made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans,” which would mean that “someone crosses party lines and works with the other Page must be correct” when the report is published.
Wild criticized Guest, saying he had “betrayed the process by revealing our deliberations just moments after leaving the committee.”
“The answer to the question of whether I have engaged in sexual activity with a person under the age of 18 is clearly NO,” Gaetz said in a letter to the Ethics Commission.
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Gaetz claims that Joel Greenberg, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for sex trafficking and fraud, among other crimes, concocted “false slanders” to shorten his sentence. Greenberg agreed with the Justice Department to provide information against Gaetz in exchange for federal authorities dropping 27 of his 33 criminal charges. Still, federal prosecutors recommended against filing charges against Gaetz because of issues with Greenberg’s credibility.
Chris Dorworth, who Greenberg claimed hosted parties where guests enjoyed illegal drugs and overt sexual acts, also said Greenberg lied:
They are total and absolute lies. I’m not speculating about that. I passed three lie detector tests administered by a retired FBI special agent who was a polygraph administrator for 35 years to counteract the utter nonsense these people have blatantly made up. @mattgaetz have not done this. https://t.co/tR256xXW88
— Chris Dorworth (@ChrisDorworth) November 19, 2024
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) argued that releasing the report would “open Pandora’s Box and break a long-standing panel rule not to release information about former members of Congress.”
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) urged his Senate colleagues not to join the “lynch mob” and to “return to established procedure, obtaining relevant information and giving the nominee an opportunity to make their case” as to why they should be confirmed. “
Others pointed to historical precedents when the Ethics Commission released information about former members in 1987 and 2011.
