What did Donald Trump do today?
He shilled some Trump-branded guitars, and nothing else.The only comment issued today by the Trump transition team, or Trump himself, came in the form of an advertisment Trump ran on his private Twitter knockoff for what appear to be cheap mass-produced guitars.
That means that what Trump didn't talk about was the release of the House Ethics Committee's report on the investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a vocal Trump diehard and, for a few days, Trump's nominee to be Attorney General.
The report (available here) summarized the bipartisan committee's findings that Gaetz
- paid tens of thousands of dollars to women in exchange for illegal drugs and sex
- used illegal drugs
- committed statutory rape by paying a minor to have sex with him
- obstructed the criminal investigation into these charges, as well as the committee's own investigation, by abusing his office
- accepted unlawful gifts from foreign lobbyists
- used his office to do favors for women he'd paid for sex
Trump has gone to great lengths to obscure how much vetting—if any—he's done of the people he plans to appoint to the highest positions in government. In fact, he's been deliberately avoiding scrutiny of his nominees by the FBI, and trying to get the incoming Republican Senate majority to let his choices skip confirmation proceedings altogether. But it does not seem possible that Trump was unaware of the committee's findings, which were known to Republicans on the committee and in Congressional leadership.
In other words, Trump's choice of Matt Gaetz as the nation's top law enforcement official was almost certainly made in full knowledge that Gaetz had almost certainly committed statutory rape, broken any number of other state and federal laws, lied to cover it up, and then used his government position to obstruct further investigation.
Gaetz almost temporarily delayed the release of the report. He asked a court this morning to issue an emergency restraining order, but failed to file the motion properly and could not fix the error before the report was released. Again, Gaetz was Trump's nominee to head the Justice Department.
Why does this matter?
- If paying children for sex doesn't cross an ethical line in a Trump administration, nothing ever will.