Matt Gaetz, who faced a torrent of scrutiny over allegations of sex trafficking and drug use, abruptly withdrew his bid to become attorney general on Thursday in the first major political setback for President-elect Donald J. Trump since his election this month.
Mr. Gaetz has consistently denied the allegations, but his prospective nomination ran into trouble in the Senate, where Republicans were deeply reluctant to confirm someone to run the same Justice Department that once investigated him on suspicion of sex trafficking an underage girl, even though no charges were brought.
The collapse of Mr. Gaetz’s prospective candidacy just 16 days after the election appeared to be the earliest such failed cabinet pick in modern history and underscored the haphazard way that Mr. Trump has gone about assembling his new administration. He picked Mr. Gaetz almost on a whim last week without extensive vetting, knowing that allegations were out there, but essentially daring Senate Republicans to accept him anyway.
What remained unclear on Thursday was whether Mr. Gaetz’s withdrawal would embolden Senate Republicans to challenge other contentious cabinet choices, such as Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host tapped for defense secretary, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic selected for secretary of health and human services.
In announcing his withdrawal a day after visiting the Senate, Mr. Gaetz insisted that he had support among fellow Republicans. But in fact, Mr. Gaetz had come to realize that he was struggling to amass enough votes to win Senate confirmation. He spoke with Mr. Trump late Thursday morning and decided to pull his name, according to people familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his private decision-making.
“While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on social media. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”
Mr. Trump responded with his own social media post expressing appreciation for Mr. Gaetz. “Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do,” the president-elect wrote. Mr. Trump did not indicate whom he might select as attorney general instead.
Mr. Gaetz is not the only high-level appointee dogged by accusations of misconduct to be picked by Mr. Trump, who himself was found liable in a civil trial last year of sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s. Mr. Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault but denies it, while Mr. Kennedy has been accused of groping a family babysitter years ago, which he has said he does not remember doing.
Elon Musk, who is to head a new effort to revamp the federal government, was sued in June along with his company SpaceX by eight former employees contending that he had created a hostile workplace for women, who were judged on their bra size and made to feel like sexual objects.
Linda McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive named this week as Mr. Trump’s choice for education secretary, was sued last month for allegedly enabling the sexual exploitation of children by an employee as early as the 1980s, which she denies.
Mr. Hegseth was on Capitol Hill on Thursday accompanied by Vice President-elect JD Vance, still serving as a senator from Ohio, to build support for his own embattled nomination. He rejected the allegation that he had attacked a woman at a Republican conference in Monterey, Calif., in 2017. A police report released on Wednesday said that he had blocked the door of his hotel room when the woman tried to leave and sexually assaulted her.
The police did not charge him and Mr. Hegseth has insisted the encounter was consensual, but three years later he paid her a settlement that included a nondisclosure agreement. His lawyer said last week that the woman “extorted him” and that Mr. Hegseth paid her because even false accusations would have been damaging to his career.
“As far as the media is concerned, I’ll keep this very simple,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday. “The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared. And that’s where I’m going to leave it.”
The storm surrounding Mr. Gaetz drew attention away from other picks that otherwise might have generated more opposition. Few complained, for instance, when Mr. Trump named Todd Blanche, his own criminal defense attorney, and two other lawyers who represented him against indictments, to the top Justice Department positions below attorney general.
By comparison with Mr. Gaetz, many Republicans welcomed Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, as a responsible institutionalist and it was unclear whether Mr. Trump might elevate him now from his choice for deputy attorney general to the department’s top position.
As it became increasingly clear that Senate confirmation was unlikely, Mr. Trump privately told people that Mr. Gaetz had less than even odds of surviving the process. Still, he made calls on his ally’s behalf in hopes of shifting what the Senate would consider acceptable.
Mr. Gaetz told people close to him that after conversations with senators and members of their staffs, he had concluded that there were at least four Republican senators in the next Congress who were implacably opposed to his nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and the newly elected John Curtis of Utah. With a 53-member majority, four defections would be enough to defeat the nomination.
Ms. Collins said in a statement after Mr. Gaetz’s withdrawal that he had “put country first” and had made “the best decision that Mr. Gaetz could have made.” Mr. McConnell called the withdrawal “an excellent move” and Ms. Murkowski called it a “sound decision.” Mr. Curtis made no immediate comment.
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said it was “pretty obvious” that Mr. Gaetz did not have the votes to be confirmed.
Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, called the withdrawal a relief. “I know enough people that were a ‘hell no’ in the conference to know that the path would have been very, very difficult, if possible, and I doubt it was,” he said.
The end of Mr. Gaetz’s potential nomination came just eight days after it was announced. A couple of hours before he disclosed his withdrawal online, Mr. Gaetz and his wife, Ginger Luckey, took a morning flight from Washington to Fort Walton Beach, in the Florida Panhandle district he represented in Congress for eight years.
Mr. Gaetz wore a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head and a baseball cap pulled down over his face, seemingly trying to avoid being recognized. He appeared to go undetected by the other passengers, except for a New York Times reporter who was on the same flight.
Mr. Gaetz, who resigned his House seat last week after being tapped by Mr. Trump, had been one of the most unpopular Republicans in the Capitol, particularly after instigating the far-right revolt that toppled Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
He stepped down from his House seat two days before the House Ethics Committee was slated to produce a report on his activities. By resigning, he effectively brought an end to the investigation since he was no longer a congressman in the panel’s jurisdiction. Republicans on the committee blocked release of the report in a meeting on Wednesday. Senators of both parties made clear that they were intent on seeing the report before voting on his confirmation.
Mr. Gaetz’s withdrawal came a day after The Times reported that federal investigators had documented a set of payments that he and his associates made in connection with drug-fueled sex parties from 2017 to 2020. Two women who have testified that he hired them for sex were among those who received money from Mr. Gaetz, according to a document obtained by The Times. A lawyer for the two women said payments to them totaled around $10,000.
Another woman who was 17 at the time she attended one of the parties received a payment from a friend of Mr. Gaetz, according to the document. Federal prosecutors ultimately dropped the case against Mr. Gaetz, but their chart of payments was obtained by the ethics committee, which was investigating whether Mr. Gaetz had sex with the woman when she was underage.
During the federal investigation, the authorities were told that Mr. Gaetz had two sexual encounters with the 17-year-old girl over the span of a single day in 2017, while he was a member of Congress, according to a person informed about the matter, confirming a CNN report.
One of the sexual encounters, the person said, occurred between Mr. Gaetz and the teenager alone, while the other encounter included an adult woman as a third participant. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters related to a federal investigation.
On an earlier day, Mr. Gaetz had a single sexual encounter with the same 17-year-old, according to another person familiar with the matter. After she turned 18, Mr. Gaetz paid for sex with her on at least two other occasions, the person said.
In picking Mr. Gaetz last week, Mr. Trump disregarded any concerns about the scandals after his advisers deadlocked over other choices, including Andrew Bailey, the attorney general of Missouri, and Robert J. Giuffra Jr., a top lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell. Mr. Gaetz’s selection was pushed heavily by Boris Epshteyn, Mr. Trump’s legal adviser, who has helped stock his Justice Department at the top levels.
Mr. Trump seemed attracted to Mr. Gaetz as attorney general especially because of the former congressman’s willingness to blow things up. The president-elect remains deeply angry at the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and hoard classified documents that did not belong to him. He has also indicated that he wants to use the Justice Department to go after his political adversaries.
Mr. Gaetz appeared to be in sync with this thinking. A vocal and bombastic critic of the Justice Department, Mr. Gaetz has suggested abolishing the F.B.I.; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and even the Justice Department as a whole. He introduced legislation last year to eliminate the A.T.F., which regulates firearms dealers and fights gun crimes.
Mr. Gaetz’s decision to resign his House seat right away, rather than wait for confirmation, now leaves him without a position in Washington. While he was just re-elected this month, he made clear in his resignation letter last week that he would not serve his new term. “I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress,” he wrote.
Whether he could reverse that decision and still take the seat again in January was not clear. At the very least, though, he could run in the special election to fill the vacancy if he wanted. Others in Florida speculated that he might seek the Senate seat of Marco Rubio, who has been picked to become Mr. Trump’s secretary of state.
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