Trump Wants Matt Gaetz To Serve As His Attorney General

In a surprise announcement, President-elect Donald Trump said he intends to nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to be his attorney general, positioning him to potentially lead the department that once investigated him for sex trafficking.
“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform.
“Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department,” Trump said before adding that Gaetz would “root out the systemic corruption at [the Department of Justice], and return the Department to its true mission of fighting Crime, and upholding our Democracy and Constitution.”
“We must have Honesty, Integrity, and Transparency at DOJ. Under Matt’s leadership, all Americans will be proud of the Department of Justice once again,” the Truth Social post concluded.
Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday afternoon to expedite a special election for his seat, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced.
The Department of Justice ended its probe into Gaetz last year without filing charges for his alleged involvement in sex trafficking and drug use, which he denies. He remained under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. However, his resignation ends the probe, and no report will be issued by the committee.
A former friend of Gaetz took a plea agreement in 2021 in which he admitted to engaging in sex for pay with an underage girl, implicating Gaetz in the activity, as well. The former friends allegedly used Venmo to pay teens to travel to them for sex and drug use.
The ethics committee said in June that its members had spoken to “more than a dozen witnesses, issued 25 subpoenas, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents in this matter,” deciding that the allegations merited additional review.
John McEntee, who once served as Trump’s White House personnel director, told the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that Gaetz once told him that he sought out a preemptive pardon from Trump related to the Department of Justice’s sex-trafficking probe. McEntee said Gaetz told him that he “did not do anything wrong” and that authorities were “trying to make his life hell.”
“And you know, if the president could give him a pardon, that would be great,” McEntee told the committee.
Gaetz has been a longtime loyalist to the president-elect.
While attending Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York this May, Gaetz even invoked the infamous “stand back and stand by” phrase that Trump used in September 2020 when, during a presidential debate, Trump was asked to directly disavow the extremist Proud Boys and did not. Several leaders of that network would go on to be convicted of seditious conspiracy to stop the transfer of power to President Joe Biden several months later.
But that was of no matter to Gaetz.
“Standing back, and standing by, Mr. President,” Gaetz wrote on social media ahead of one of Trump’s court appearances in the monthslong trial.
The lapdog stance from Gaetz has been long-standing when it comes to Jan. 6, in particular.
In 2022, during a news conference with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), he declared that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “fedsurrection,” promoting the popular far-right conspiracy theory that the Capitol attack was incited and led by FBI informants and federal agents.
“Congresswoman Greene and I are not here to celebrate Jan. 6. We are not here to obsess about it, but we are here to expose the truth. … Jan. 6 last year wasn’t an insurrection … but it may very well have been a ‘fedsurrection,’” Gaetz said on the first anniversary of the attack.
He has regularly joined and defended Republicans who have claimed the 2020 election was stolen, saying that he was “proud of the work we did on Jan. 6 to make legitimate arguments about election integrity.”
None of those arguments, however, were seen as legitimate in more than 60 courts that rejected claims of voter fraud. Claims of voter fraud were also disproven by the nation’s intelligence agencies, and when Trump cohorts like Rudy Giuliani were directly asked for proof of fraud, they were never able to provide it.
In February, Gaetz also led a group of more than 60 Republicans to sign onto a resolution stating that Trump “did not engage in insurrection.”
Gaetz has visited the jail where Jan. 6 defendants are housed, calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to improve conditions for them. He has also led a “field hearing” in the past about Jan. 6 prisoners.
The “field hearing” was not an actual congressional committee hearing, but operated akin to one with Gaetz operating as “chairman” while he elicited commentary and heaped honor on a group of guests with direct ties to the Capitol attack, including the wife of Ronald McAbee, a man who was awaiting trial for allegedly attacking a police officer on Jan. 6.
Also present at the hearing was an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” movement, Ed Martin, and Jeffrey Clark, Trump’s former acting assistant attorney general for the civil division at DOJ, who prosecutors allege tried to wiggle his way into the acting attorney general role in 2021 by intending to follow Trump’s orders to open probes into bogus claims of voter fraud.
As The Washington Post noted in June 2023, the hearing was held on the same day Trump was being arraigned in Florida for his now-dismissed classified documents case.
Reactions to Trump’s announcement ranged from shock to delight.
“He’s the attorney general. Suck it up,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told reporters Wednesday.
Gaetz is, of course, not attorney general yet — he still needs to be confirmed by the Senate, where there will likely be resistance.
“I don’t think this is a serious nomination for attorney general. We need to have a serious attorney general,” Sen. Liza Murkowski (R-Alaska) told reporters.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was “shocked.”
“I’m sure that there will be many, many questions raised at Mr. Gaetz’s hearing,” Collins told Punch Bowl News.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy nonprofit Public Citizen, warned about the implications of an Attorney General Gaetz, whom he dubbed “singularly unqualified.”
“Under Gaetz, we’d have every reason to expect an America where corporate criminals walk free, but immigrants and people of color are harassed or rounded up with minimal pretext,” Weissman said in a statement.
By selecting Gaetz, Trump apparently set aside a plea from GOP leaders in the House to look elsewhere for his presidential appointments. Republicans are projected to win control of the chamber, but by a narrow margin, and Trump has already chosen two other members of Congress.
CORRECTION: A prior version of this article misstated Sen. Susan Collins’ political party.