The right people are losing their minds over President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become attorney general—the now-resigned Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
“THIS IS WHY WE WERE FROM THE START NEVER TRUMP,” neoconservative ideologue Bill Kristol posted on X. Former national security adviser John Bolton also took to X to pile on: “Gaetz must be the worst nomination for a cabinet position in American history.”
I already liked the Gaetz pick for attorney general; Kristol and Bolton are simply making it easier.
Since the nomination, however, defenders of Gaetz have been few and far between. Over the past week, a lot of ink has been spilled at National Review opposing the Gaetz pick. “Matt Gaetz Cannot Be Allowed to Become Attorney General,” wrote staff writer Jeffrey Blehar. “Trump Doesn’t Have a Mandate for Chaos,” senior writer Noah Rothman proclaimed, taking aim at Gaetz’s nomination. The dead horse wasn’t quite beaten enough. The headline “The Senate Should Reject Matt Gaetz” adorned the top of a Nov. 15 piece from the editorial board.
In fairness, National Review’s editorial board sees the logic of Trump’s pick. They understand Trump’s decade in politics has made him “highly resentful and suspicious of politicized law enforcement.” They’ll even admit that Trump needs a loyalist—Gaetz just isn’t the right one.
But Gaetz is the right man for the job.
Since coming to Washington in 2017, Gaetz has been the most outspoken Republican in Congress about the abuses of the federal justice system and the need for drastic reform.
There is now broad consensus on the American Right that the federal government has been weaponized against everyday Americans and that the Department of Justice and purportedly independent federal law enforcement agencies are the most egregious perpetrators. Such a consensus simply didn’t exist when Trump won in 2016. Gaetz was there from the start, and his work in Congress is why that consensus exists today.
Trump’s statement announcing Gaetz’s nomination recognizes as much.
“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice,” Trump’s statement read. “On the House Judiciary Committee, which performs oversight of DOJ, Matt played a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and exposing alarming and systemic Government Corruption and Weaponization. He is a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Matt will root out the systemic corruption at DOJ, and return the Department to its true mission of fighting Crime, and upholding our Democracy and Constitution.”
In January 2018, Gaetz led the effort to release a top-secret memo circulated to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence members that outlined Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses from the Obama administration to unlawfully spy on the Trump campaign and transition in 2016. Sixty-five of Gaetz’s House colleagues petitioned then-committee Chair Devin Nunes to release the document that was made available to the public in February 2018.
At the time, Gaetz promised the memo would “shock the conscience of this country.” It did. The memo revealed how the Obama administration heavily relied on the Steele dossier to obtain its warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court without disclosing that Christopher Steele was paid over $160,000 by the DNC and by the Hillary Clinton campaign through the law firm Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS.
Furthermore, even after Steele’s media leaks forced the FBI to terminate Steele as a source, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, a top DOJ official whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, maintained a professional relationship with Steele. Steele once reportedly told Ohr that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected.” None of this was ever disclosed when obtaining the FISA warrant.
It was one of the first of many revelations that showed the public the Russian collusion scandal was a hoax, and Gaetz deserves that credit.
Less than two weeks later, the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, would take the lives of 17 students and injure 17 more. Gaetz was one of a group of bipartisan lawmakers to put pressure on the FBI to reform after enforcement failures in the lead up to the shooting. The end result was a $127.5 million settlement between the DOJ and the Parkland shooting victims’ families, and the FBI instituted reforms suggested by Gaetz and other members of Congress to prevent similar failures in the future.
Throughout his time in Congress, Gaetz was the thorn in the side of the DOJ and its attached law enforcement agencies.
When Bryan Vorndran, the assistant director of the FBI Cyber Program, testified in Congress in March 2022, Gaetz simply asked if he was aware of where the FBI was keeping Hunter Biden’s laptop. Vorndran didn’t know. This after it was already widely speculated that the FBI and outside intelligence-related organizations pressured Big Tech companies like Facebook into censoring stories about the illicit contents of Biden’s laptop. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted in October that the FBI colluded with Facebook to suppress the laptop.
Later, in July 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray would testify before Congress. Gaetz again went after the abuse of the FISA process. “Who has been held accountable or fired as a consequence of the FBI using the FISA process as their like, creepy, personal snoop machine?” Gaetz asked.
“There have been instances in which individuals have had disciplinary action,” Wray said. But when Gaetz asked the FBI director to name names, Wray couldn’t.
“Don’t you see that that’s kind of the thing, you preside over the FBI that has the lowest level of trust in the FBI’s history!” Gaetz exclaimed. “People trusted the FBI more when J. Edgar Hoover was running the place than when you are and the reason is because you don’t give straight answers, you give answers that later a court deems are not true and then at the end of the day you won’t criticize an obvious shakedown when it’s directly in front of us and it appears as though you are whitewashing conduct of corrupt people.”
As a member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Gaetz continued to aggressively attack the DOJ and its subsidiaries.
When special counsel John Durham testified before the committee in June 2023 about his investigation into the “Crossfire Hurricane” operation against the 2016 Trump campaign, Gaetz suggested that Durham let high-ranking DOJ officials off the hook.
“It seems like more than disappointment. It seems like you weren’t really trying to expose the true core of the corruption. That you were trying to go at it another way,” Gaetz told Durham. He faulted the special counsel for allowing key DOJ officials to avoid questioning, along with other failures in the investigation.
Surely, Gaetz might get the same treatment he gave DOJ officials in his Senate confirmation hearings. He’ll have to fight tooth and claw just for the chance to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.
Details of the now-ended House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz are already leaking, and will likely be leaked in full before Gaetz’s confirmation hearings. But when President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice refuses to bring charges after an investigation into one of its political opponents, suffice it to say I have my doubts about the validity of the claims brought against Trump’s nominee for AG—not to mention that a Florida man is serving a five-year prison sentence for attempting to extort Gaetz’s family over the sex-trafficking investigation.
Republicans in the Senate might not read the tea leaves. Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Ak., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, the most moderate members of the Senate GOP conference, have already expressed their shock over Gaetz’s nomination and hinted they may be opposed. But Murkowski and Collins might not be alone. “My phone is blowing up with Senate Republican aides aghast at Trump’s nomination of Gaetz,” Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News posted on X. “Some quite confidently saying there’s no way their boss votes to confirm him. We’ll see.”
See, there aren’t many folks in Washington, and even fewer lawyers, who know what time it is. Matt Gaetz does.