Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz is denouncing what he says are “new frivolous investigations” launched against him by the House Ethics Committee.
Since 2021, when the House was controlled by Democrats, the ethics panel has been investigating allegations that Gaetz had “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.” The probes continued after control of the chamber shifted to Republicans last year.
Gaetz was also previously investigated by the Department of Justice over allegations that he trafficked and engaged in sex with a minor, although charges against the congressman were later dropped and he has continued to maintain his innocence.
Gaetz on Monday suggested that the Republican-controlled committee had launched new investigations against him in a post to X, formerly Twitter, while predicting that the matter would end in his “exoneration.”
“The House Ethics Committee has closed four probes into me, which emerged from lies intended solely to smear me,” Gaetz wrote. “Instead of working with me to ban Congressional stock trading, the Ethics Committee is now opening new frivolous investigations.”
“They are doing this to avoid the obvious fact that every investigation into me ends the same way: my exoneration,” he added.
Gaetz went on to suggest that former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who retired from Congress late last year after being ousted from the speakership following a motion to vacate by Gaetz, was behind the investigations.
“This is Soviet,” Gaetz wrote. “Kevin McCarthy showed them the man, and they are now trying to find the crime. I work for Northwest Floridians who won’t be swayed by this nonsense and McCarthy and his goons know it.”
The reason for the committee’s new investigations was unclear at the time of publication. Gaetz’s office declined Newsweek’s request for comment, saying that the congressman’s post “speaks for itself.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to the offices of Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Representative Susan Wild, via email on Monday evening.
McCarthy has claimed that Gaetz’s motion to vacate the speakership, which resulted in his October 2023 removal, was a “personal thing” motivated by his refusal to end the ethics committee investigation.
“He was trying to get something illegally stopped,” McCarthy said on CBS News’ Face the Nation in March. “I think the Ethics Committee, it was purely Matt coming to me, trying [to get] me to do something illegal to stop the Ethics Committee from moving forward [with] an investigation that was started long before I became speaker.”
Gaetz has been a highly divisive figure in the House, including among his GOP colleagues, some of whom reportedly floated the idea of expelling him from the chamber at the time that he moved to oust McCarthy.
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