Five revelations from the House ethics report on Matt Gaetz

The House Ethics Committee's report on Donald Trump ally Matt Gaetz, released Monday, revealed new details about the former congressman's alleged conduct, at least one new accusation and insight into the committee's investigation.

From at least 2017 to 2020, the panel concluded that the former Florida congressman regularly paid women to “engage in sexual activity,” had sex with a 17-year-old girl, used or possessed illegal drugs, and accepted gifts. outside the borders of the House of Representatives and helped in this. A woman obtains a passport, according to the report.

She explained that the committee “did not find sufficient evidence” that he violated federal laws related to sex trafficking — which had been discussed in the public arena for years as well.

Gaetz, who resigned from the US House of Representatives in November – days before the report was scheduled to be published and after Trump announced his pick for US Attorney General – denied the committee's findings and accused it of conducting an unfair investigation.

Here are four notable parts of the long-awaited report.

House investigators said Gaetz paid more than $90,000 (£71,843) to women for sex and drugs, but created a complex web of transactions that was difficult to trace, according to the report.

“The committee was unable to determine the full extent to which Rep. Gaetz’s payments to the women amounted to compensation for sexual activity with him,” the report concluded.

He allegedly used his friend Joel Greenberg, who is currently serving 11 years in prison for crimes he said he committed with Gaetz, as a frequent go-between and logged into Greenberg's SeekingArrangement.com account to interact with young women.

Gaetz also paid women directly, sometimes through platforms like Venmo, according to the report. But the commission said he often used someone else's PayPal account or an account linked to an email address under a fake name.

He also withheld payments, the commission wrote. In one example, he gave a college student a “cash” check with “tuition reimbursement” in the memo line. The woman said she got it after a group encounter, which “may have been a form of coercion because I really needed the money.”

Gaetz posted on social media that he gave the money to the women he was involved with as gifts, not as payments. The commission found that two women, aged 27 and 25, did not view their relationships as merely transactional.

Another woman who was considered his girlfriend invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked whether she had ever been paid for sex or drugs, or to pay others.

The commission attempted to prove that Gaetz often paid for sex through a text message describing his inability to pay at some point.

His then-girlfriend said in the letter that he and Greenberg were “a little tight on their cash flow” and asked a group of women “if Customer Appreciation Week could be more special.”

A few months later, according to the panel, she wrote: “BTW Matt also mentioned that he would be a little generous on the ‘customer appreciation’ issue one last time.”

The commission also said Gaetz bought illegal drugs or compensated people for them.

He gives examples of his alleged cocaine and ecstasy/MDMA use, but focuses on what appears to be a heavy marijuana habit. He allegedly asked women to bring marijuana cartridges to meetings and events, and created a fake email account to purchase marijuana.

According to the report, the trip he took to the Bahamas “was paid for by an associate of Rep. Gaetz with ties to the medical marijuana industry, who also allegedly paid for female escorts to accompany them.”

One woman felt that drug and alcohol use at parties impaired her ability to “know or fully consent to what was really going on.”

“In fact, almost every woman the committee spoke with was unable to recall details of at least one or more events they attended with Representative Gaetz, and they attributed this to drug or alcohol use,” the report said.

His then-girlfriend, who was 21 when they met and “paid tens of thousands of dollars” during their two-year relationship, often participated in meetings with the women and served as a go-between, according to the report.

A woman told the committee she was 17 when she had sex with Gaetz twice at a party in 2017 — at least once in front of other people — while under the influence of ecstasy. The woman, who had just completed her junior year of high school, received $400 from him.

She also told the committee that she did not tell Gaetz that she was a minor, and the committee found no evidence that the former congressman knew she was a minor.

In 2021, Greenberg pleaded guilty to sexually trafficking the girl.

Gaetz also allegedly directed his chief of staff to expedite a passport request for the woman he was sleeping with, who he said was a voter in his district. He also allegedly gave her $1,000.

Gaetz violated House rules prohibiting the use of his office to obtain special favors, according to the committee, which wrote: “The woman was not a constituent of his, and the case was not handled in the same manner as similar passport assistance cases.”

The committee devoted a large portion of the report to explaining how Gaetz obstructed its investigations, including failing to provide evidence that he said would “exonerate him.”

The report concluded that he “consistently sought to distract, deter or mislead the committee to prevent his actions from being exposed.”

The report stated that Gaetz, who accused the committee of using a “weapon” against him and leaking information to the press, claimed that the committee was working on behalf of former Speaker of Parliament Kevin McCarthy. Last year, he helped lead the effort to oust then-House Speaker McCarthy from office.

While Gaetz claimed to have “voluntarily produced tens of thousands of records,” he gave the committee “only a few hundred records, more than 90% of which are either irrelevant or publicly available,” the report found.

One sore point was a trip to the Bahamas, where the commission said he withheld information. It ultimately concluded that he had violated the rules regarding gifts because the value of the trip was too high.

The committee also cited the Justice Department's investigation into the allegations against Gaetz as a reason for the delay.

Some witnesses asked the committee to use testimony they had given the department, but it refused to share it because it did not bring charges and because it said it might deter future witnesses in other cases from coming forward.

The report ends with a one-page statement from Ethics Committee Chairman Michael Guest “on behalf of dissenting committee members” who were not named.

These members do not challenge the committee's findings, they wrote, but they disagreed with the report's release after Gaetz resigned from the House, which has not happened since 2006.

It “departs from longstanding Committee practice, exposes the Committee to unnecessary criticism, and will be viewed by some as an attempt to weaponize the Committee process.”