Matt Gaetz Quits As Trump’s Attorney General Pick After Underage Sex Scandal, Trump is Humiliated

The Department of Justice’s investigation into whether Gaetz sex-trafficked a minor girl ended last year without charges being filed. But the House Ethics Committee later restarted its own probe of allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, gave special favors to personal contacts and tried to obstruct government efforts to investigate him.

CNN’s Paula Reid said that Gaetz’s withdrawal came less than an hour after he was contacted by the outlet for comment on its report that a woman told the ethics panel that she had had two sexual encounters with Gaetz in 2017, when she was 17 years old.

Gaetz has denied having sex with an underage girl. His decision to resign from Congress after being tapped for AG effectively ended the ethics probe by removing him from the committee’s jurisdiction.

The document, assembled by investigators during a three-year sex-trafficking investigation into Mr. Gaetz, is a chart that shows a web of thousands of dollars in Venmo payments between Mr. Gaetz and a group of his friends, associates and women who had drug-fueled sex parties between 2017 and 2020, according to testimony that participants are said to have given to federal and congressional investigators.

At the parties, women, and a girl who was 17 at the time, were paid for sex, according to accounts of the participants’ testimony from people briefed on what they said.

The document bolsters recent claims by a lawyer for two of the women who say they had sex with Mr. Gaetz for money. It shows thousands of dollars in payments Mr. Gaetz made to both of the lawyer’s clients.