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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Friday he will “strongly request” that the chamber’s ethics committee not release its sexual misconduct report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.
), falsely claiming it’s “not the way we do things” and dismissing concerns from both parties. “The rules of the House has always been that a former member is beyond the jurisdiction of the ethics committee,” he told reporters Friday, when asked if it’s in the public’s interest to see the report. Gaetz resigned earlier this week after President-elect Donald Trump nominated him to serve as attorney general.
His resignation allows Florida to quickly select his replacement in time for the next Congress ― and it also immediately put a stop to the ethics committee probe. Despite top lawmakers from both parties calling for the committee’s report to be made public anyway, noting that its release was imminent, Johnson is pushing back. “That is not the way we do things in the House, and I think that would be a terrible precedent to set,” Johnson said.
But precedent has already been set for such situations. The committee has twice released ethics reports after or on the same day a lawmaker has resigned ― once in 1987 and once in 1990. Johnson argued those precedents don’t count.
“If it’s been broken once or twice, it should not have been,” he said. Fprmer Republican congressman Charlie Dent, who represented Pennsylvania and 2005 to 2018, said in an ABC News interview Friday that he’s certain the report will be “damning” and that even though the committee wouldn’t ordinarily release a report after a resignation, there’s nothing stopping them. “I believe precedent would allow them to” release it, he said.
Conversations between Johnson and Trump about the matter remain under wraps. The two reportedly met at Mar-a-Lago Thursday night, according to Punchbowl News , but on Friday Johnson refused to comment on that. “I’m not talking to anybody about what I’ve said to Trump,” he said.
The release of the ethics report could make it that much harder for Gaetz to get confirmed. Several Republican lawmakers have already expressed skepticism about his odds for making it through the process given the breadth of the allegations against him, which range from sexual misconduct involving a minor and illicit drug use to accepting improper gifts and seeking to obstruct government probes into his conduct. “I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Sen.
Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told HuffPost on Wednesday. Reese Gorman, a reporter with NOTUS, described a grim reaction from Johnson when he asked him about blocking the report. “When I asked Johnson if he would want to know if the top law enforcement officer in the country had sex with a minor or not,” Gorman posted on social media, “he rolled his eyes and didn’t answer the question.
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