WASHINGTON — Members of the House Ethics Committee will meet behind closed doors Wednesday afternoon to discuss whether to publicly release a report detailing their sweeping investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general.
Several Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have said they want to review the House report before a Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Gaetz next year. But House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., a close Trump ally, has pointed out that the Ethics Committee has jurisdiction only over sitting members, and Gaetz resigned from office last week after Trump tapped him to lead the Justice Department.
“I’ve made very clear that it’s an important guardrail for our institution that we not use the House Ethics Committee to investigate and report on persons who are not members of this body,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday. “Matt Gaetz is not a member of the body anymore.”
The bipartisan Ethics Committee — led by Chairman Michael Guest, R-Miss., and Rep. Susan Wild, D-Pa. — investigated Gaetz, R-Fla., on and off over the past three years as it looked into allegations that he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, gave special favors to people with whom he had personal relationships and obstructed the probe.
The committee has interviewed two women who testified that Gaetz paid them for sex at a small party in Florida, where prostitution is illegal, an attorney for the women, Joel Leppard, told NBC News this week. One of the women also testified that she witnessed Gaetz having sex with a friend who was 17 years old at the time, said Leppard, though she does not believe Gaetz knew the friend’s age at the time.
Leppard added that his clients want the House report to be made public. “They want the American people to know the truth and that they are speaking the truth,” he said.
Gaetz has denied all of the allegations, which the Trump transition team has called “baseless,” pointing out that the Justice Department had closed out its related yearslong investigation without charging Gaetz with a crime.
Trump said Tuesday he is not reconsidering naming Gaetz to be his attorney general, despite reservations from Republican senators who will oversee Gaetz’s confirmation once he is officially nominated. Trump has been “heavily working the phones” to build support for Gaetz, a transition official said.
And before the Ethics meeting, Vice President-elect JD Vance was spotted Wednesday in the Capitol shepherding Gaetz to meetings with GOP senators, including senior Judiciary member Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
The Ethics Committee has several options at its private meeting, set for 1 p.m. ET Wednesday. It can vote to publicly release the report or vote not to release it, take an exit ramp by forwarding it to the Senate or choose to take no action.
A committee spokesman had no comment about the meeting.
Wild, the top Democrat on the committee, said this week that the House report should “absolutely” be released to the public and that it should be sent to the Senate at the very least. She argued that there is precedent for the Ethics Committee to publish reports after members of Congress have resigned.
It happened in the case of Rep. Bill Boner, D-Tenn., who resigned Oct. 5, 1987, to become mayor of Nashville. The Ethics Committee released an initial staff report the following December examining allegations that Boner misused campaign funds, failed to disclose gifts and accepted bribes. The report did not make any recommendations to the full committee.
“In the committee’s view, the general policy against issuing reports in cases such as here involved is outweighed by the responsibility of the Committee to fully inform the public regarding the status and results of its efforts up to the date of Representative Boner’s departure from Congress,” the Ethics Committee said at the time.
Three years later, the committee released a short staff report immediately after Rep. Buz Lukens, R-Ohio, resigned as he faced allegations by a congressional employee that he had made unwanted and offensive sexual advances.
If the committee declines to make the Gaetz report public, any House member can try to force a vote to release it.
In September 1996, House Democrats tried to force the Ethics Committee to release a report from an outside counsel about its investigation of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. The House rejected the resolution in a vote on the floor.
Katherine Doyle, Jake Traylor and Frank Thorp V contributed.
