House Ethics Committee to keep Gaetz report under wraps

The House Ethics Committee met Wednesday but did not release its report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), resisting significant pressure to release its findings after President-elect Trump selected the controversial Florida Republican to be his attorney general.

“There is not an agreement by the committee to release the report," Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters following a roughly two-hour meeting.

The panel, which met behind closed doors, took multiple votes, a source familiar with the situation told The Hill, including one to release the report as-is, which failed, another to publish just the exhibits associated with the report, which also failed, and a third to formally “complete” the report, which passed in a bipartisan fashion.

The development caps off a week of speculation regarding the committee’s work, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pushing for its publication, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) vigorously advocating for it to remain a secret, and Trump’s team charging ahead with the selection of Gaetz despite the drama.

The committee is scheduled to meet again on Dec. 5 “to further consider this matter,” according to Rep. Susan Wild (Pa.), the top Democrat on the panel.

Shortly after Guest’s statement, Wild offered remarks on behalf of the Democrats, saying it would be “inaccurate” to take Guest’s statement to mean there was consensus on the committee, confirming that a vote was taken and suggesting that it broke along partisan lines.

“I will say that a vote was taken,” Wild said. “As many of you know, this committee is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans — five Dems, five Republicans — which means that in order to affirmatively move something forward, somebody has to cross party lines and vote with the other side — which happens a lot, by the way, and we often vote unanimously.”

Wild said that she made a separate public statement because Guest “betrayed the process by disclosing our deliberations within moments after walking out of the committee.”

Details from the report could make their way to the public — or to senators considering Gaetz's nomination — even if the Ethics panel never moves to release it.

Some of the evidence and testimony reportedly on file with the committee has been leaked to ABC News, and a lawyer for two women who he says spoke to the Ethics Committee has been publicly saying that they told the panel they saw Gaetz “having sex with a minor” at a party.

Gaetz has vigorously denied the allegations, accused a former associate and convicted fraudster of plotting with others to lie about him to reduce his prison sentence, and has noted that the Department of Justice declined to charge him with a crime.

One Democrat is already seeking to extract the Ethics panel’s findings in another way.

Rep. Sean Casten (Ill.) said in a statement released as the panel met that he would file a privileged resolution to force the committee to release its findings — triggering a vote of the whole House within two legislative days — if the Ethics Committee did not do so. Such a move was made in 1996, when Democrats unsuccessfully attempted to force the Ethics Committee to release its preliminary findings on then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

“The allegations against Matt Gaetz are serious. They are credible. The House Ethics Committee has spent years conducting a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of it,” Casten said. “This information must be made available for the Senate to provide its constitutionally required advice and consent.”

The committee could also vote to release the report at a later date.

“We have regularly scheduled meetings between now and the end of the year,” Guest said.

Guest, in comments to reporters before the meeting, expressed reservations about releasing the committee’s findings because the report was not yet completed.

Pressed on how it could be released before it was entirely finished, Guest responded: “That is something that we will be talking about today.”

“And that is another reason I have some reservations about releasing any unfinished work,” he added.

The panel’s Wednesday meeting came as Gaetz was on the other side of the Capitol meeting with senators on Wednesday to advocate for his own confirmation. Several Republican senators have said they want to see the Ethics panel’s findings, while waves of Democrats have called for its release.

Gaetz was the subject of a years-long investigation by the committee starting in 2021 that examined allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Gaetz was accused of accepting improper gifts, dispensing special privileges and favors to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship and seeking to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.

He was also previously the subject of an investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) — the very agency he has been tapped to lead — which investigated Gaetz over allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl. The DOJ, however, declined to charge him with a crime.

Gaetz told the Ethics Committee in a September letter that he would “no longer voluntarily participate” in the panel’s probe into him, accusing it of leading a “political payback exercise” and calling it “uncomfortably nosy.” He accused the panel of asking for a list of adult women with whom he’d had sex over the last seven years.

In that letter, Gaetz said the answer to the question of whether he has engaged in sexual activity with any individual under the age of 18 “is unequivocally NO.” And Gaetz accused his former associate Joel Greenberg, who was convicted of fraud and had cooperated with the DOJ’s investigation into Gaetz, of coordinating “false smears” in order to reduce his prison sentence.

Gaetz abruptly resigned from the House the same day that Trump announced he would nominate the Florida lawmaker to be attorney general, a move described as a way to kick-start the special election process and lessen the impacts of being one member down in a slim majority.

But many Republicans saw Gaetz’s effort as an attempt to squash the report. The Ethics Committee had been scheduled to meet to consider the Gaetz matter just two days after his resignation, a source told The Hill.

Typically, the Ethics panel ends its investigations and does not release its findings on members who have departed the House.

Johnson, the Speaker, has argued that such a move would “open a Pandora’s box” and break a long-standing “rule” of the panel to not publish information on former members of Congress.

But there are some previous examples of Ethics investigators releasing information on former members.

In 1987, the panel released its report into former Rep. William Boner (D-Tenn.) after he resigned from the House. And in 2011, the Senate Ethics Committee released its preliminary report into former Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) after he departed the chamber.

—Updated at 5:05 p.m.