Republican Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday he does not want the House Ethics Committee to release its report on Matt Gaetz.
Following Donald Trump’s nomination of Gaetz to serve as attorney general on Wednesday, there have been increasing calls from both Republicans and Democrats for the report to be released publicly.
This would break with Ethics Committee norms as Gaetz resigned his spot in Congress immediately after being nominated, meaning the committee no longer has jurisdiction over the former Florida Republican.
But advocates for the report’s release say that its contents are pertinent to whether or not Gaetz gets confirmed by the Senate, and therefore it should be released.
Speaker Johnson pushed back on that Friday, saying he wants the Ethics Committee to refrain from publishing the potentially damaging file.
‘I’m going to strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report because that is not the way we do things in the House, and I think that would be a terrible precedent to set,’ Johnson said coming out of his office.
The Ethics panel was set to meet Friday to decide whether to release the report.
However that meeting was scuttled after Gaetz’s sudden resignation.
Speaker Mike Johnson said he does not want the Ethics Committee to release its files on former Rep. Matt Gaetz
Gaetz was photographed at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday night
Donald Trump nominated Gaetz to be attorney general this week
His exit comes as allegations resurfaced Thursday about a woman who reportedly testified to the committee that Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17.
The woman – now in her 20s – talked about Gaetz and her having sex when she was a minor in high school while ‘representing that she was an adult,’ sources told ABC News.
The FBI had investigated similar claims against Gaetz, but the DOJ opted not to indict him over claims he sex trafficked a minor.
Trump’s pick of the embattled former congressman to oversee the Justice Department, FBI, DEA, ATF and related agencies has shocked Republicans and Democrats.
And the bombshell claims could derail his hopes of taking the helm as attorney general.
Already reports indicate that Republicans in the Senate are not on board with Gaetz becoming AG.
According to the Wall Street Journal, sources say that Gaetz already has at least 30 Republicans planning on voting against his nomination.
‘The President’s role is to make the nomination, but we need to have complete vetting of the nominees, not only so we know that the nominee is qualified, but also to protect the president,’ Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said Thursday.
He ‘absolutely’ wants to review the House Ethics Committee’s report on Gaetz’s conduct.
Cornyn even floated the idea of taking legal action to review the report’s contents.
‘There’s various ways we can glean access to it, we can subpoena it,’ he told reporters. ‘I don’t I don’t think any of us want to fly blind.’
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks at a press conference following elections for leadership positions within the House Republican Caucus in Washington, DC on November 13, 2024
Gaetz was by Trump’s side during his legal hearings in New York earlier this year
Earlier in the week Johnson pleaded with Trump to not select any more Cabinet members from the House of Representatives as it could threaten the Republican’s slim majority in the chamber.
Republicans officially won the House on Wednesday, gaining control of the 218 seat minimum needed to hold the majority.
But their majority is already being threatened – and not by Democrats.
The president-elect has already snatched up several high-profile GOP members of the House to fill the many positions in his future administration.
Trump has nominated Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York to be Ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz of Florida to be national security advisor, and Gaetz.
As it stands, Republicans have won 218 seats to the Democrats’ 209 seats in the next Congress that will be convened in January 2025. Eight House races still remain without results.
‘It’s a great problem to have,’ Johnson optimistically told Fox News. ‘We have an embarrassment of riches in the House Republican Congress.’