A lawyer for two women who testified against Representative Matt Gaetz as part of a scuttled House ethics probe is revealing new details about what his clients told investigators. Between the summer of 2017 and the end of 2018, the lawyer told Politico, his clients attended between six and 10 “sex parties” with Gaetz, where they claim that both “group sex situations” and illegal drug use went down. One of the women also told investigators that she saw Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was underage at the time of the incident.
Gaetz, Donald Trump’s surprise nominee for attorney general, has fiercely denied any allegations of wrongdoing, and the Department of Justice ended a federal investigation into his conduct without filing charges last year. However, that did not prevent the House Committee on Ethics from continuing its own investigation. The group had reportedly planned to vote on releasing its findings last week. Instead, President-elect Trump nominated Gaetz to lead the DOJ. Gaetz then resigned from Congress, effectively torpedoing the probe and the chances the House would make its findings public. The committee is now slated to meet Wednesday to discuss the report. On Sunday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN that it “should not come out.” “I’m going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report,” he said last week, “because that is not the way we do things in the House.”
But some Republican lawmakers—and many Democrats—are demanding to know what the Ethics Committee found. Gaetz still needs to be confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans will hold by a slim two-vote margin in the new Congress. Already, Republican Senators Markwayne Mullin, Joni Ernst, John Curtis and John Cornyn have indicated they’d like to see what the House panel dug up; Joel Leppard, the attorney for the two women who testified to the House committee, is also expected to call on the House to release its findings in a series of Monday TV interviews. “Ultimately, I hope it puts a lot of pressure on the panel to release the report,” he told Politico. “My clients have already been through this several times, and they really, really do not want to testify again, especially not on the floor of the Senate.” A lawyer for a third witness—a woman who reportedly testified that she had sex with Gaetz when she was 17 years old—has also called on the House to release its report.
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