Speaker Johnson says Gaetz’s ethics report should not be released, rebuffing senators

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday he will “strongly request” that the House Ethics Committee not release the results of its investigation into ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz, who is rejecting senators demanding access now that Gaetz is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general.

Johnson’s intervention is highly unusual, as the Ethics Panel has traditionally operated independently. His action certainly appears to add to the growing fury on Capitol Hill over Gaetz’s nomination to become the nation’s top law enforcement official.

“I’m going to urge the Ethics Committee not to release the report because that’s not the way we do things in the House of Representatives,” Johnson told reporters at the U.S. Capitol. “And I think that would be a terrible precedent to set.”

Ethics reports have previously been released following a member’s resignation, although this is extremely rare.

Johnson’s comments were a reversal from Wednesday, when he suggested a hands-off approach to the Gaetz report. The “chairman of the House of Representatives is not involved in this and cannot be involved in it,” he said earlier about the Ethics Committee.

The bipartisan Ethics Panel is under immense pressure as it weighs what to do about the yearslong investigation into sexual misconduct and other allegations against Gaetz, who resigned from Congress on Wednesday after Trump announced him as his nominee for attorney general.

It is standard practice for the Ethics Commission to end investigations when members of Congress resign on the grounds that they are not authorized to proceed. But the circumstances with Gaetz are far from standard, given his potential role in Trump’s Cabinet. Senators say the panel’s materials need to see the light of day so they can fully review his nomination.

“The sequence and timing of Mr. Gaetz’s resignation from the House of Representatives raises serious questions about the contents of the House Ethics Committee report,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Thursday. “We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to remain hidden from the American people.”

Gaetz has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and said last year that the separate Justice Department investigation against him into sex trafficking allegations involving underage girls ended without federal charges.

“The rules of the House of Representatives have always been that a former member is outside the jurisdiction of the ethics committee,” Johnson added. “And so I don’t think that’s relevant.”

But both Republican and Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee that would review Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general have called for the report to be made available to them.

“I think it will be essential in the proceedings,” said Senator Thomas Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina.

Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, said: “I don’t think there should be any restrictions on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigation, including what the House Ethics Committee has produced.”

However, the chairman of the Ethics Panel, Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss., says he doesn’t know if the committee could provide the report to the Senate: “That’s something the staff is looking into and trying to provide. guidance of the members.”

When asked whether he would at least discuss the report with members of the Senate, Gast said: “That is a decision that the committee as a whole has to make at some point.”

Trump’s attorney general is expected to oversee radical changes to the Justice Department, which has been the target of Trump’s ire over two criminal cases accusing him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and hoarding of secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump, who has branded himself a victim of politically motivated prosecutions, repeatedly promised during his campaign that he would retaliate against his political enemies if he returned to the White House.

In a statement Wednesday announcing his pick, Trump said Gaetz would root out “systemic corruption” at the Justice Department and return the department “to its true mission of fighting crime and upholding our democracy and Constitution.”

The federal sex trafficking investigation into Gaetz began under Attorney General Bill Barr during Trump’s first term and focused on allegations that Gaetz and former political ally Joel Greenberg paid underage girls and escorts or offered them gifts in exchange for sex.

Greenberg, a fellow Republican who served as a tax collector in Florida’s Seminole County, admitted in 2021 as part of a plea deal with prosecutors 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 to 11 years in prison in late 2022.