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When the long-awaited House Ethics committee report on Matt Gaetz came out Monday morning, it offered a stark reminder of how vital it is to continue to carry out thorough investigations, especially as investigators are being increasingly vilified. Today we know much that we did not previously know about Gaetz’s fitness to hold public office. That is to the benefit of absolutely everyone. And anyone who thinks differently should have to explain why we should have remained in the dark.
The committee’s findings were horrific. The 42-page document, which Gaetz tried unsuccessfully to suppress, found the former congressman had “violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.” (Gaetz has denied all of the allegations). Their investigation found that Donald Trump’s first pick for the chief law enforcement officer of the United States had, among other things, purchased drugs including cocaine and ecstasy on multiple occasions; accepted gifts, including transportation and lodging in the Bahamas, in excess of permissible amounts; paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex; lied to the State Department about the identity of one of these women so that she could get an American passport; and paid a 17-year-old girl—a high school junior at the time—for sex.
The report lists federal and state statutes and myriad House Rules the committee concludes Gaetz may have violated.
Although the broad allegations against Gaetz were well known when Trump first nominated him to head the DOJ, in recent months, there’s been a chorus of voices suggesting this investigation was either irrelevant or should be quashed outright. Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene, JD Vance, Jim Jordan, Mike Johnson, Josh Hawley, and Trump himself were among the many Republicans who stood up for Gaetz. Some House Republicans even attempted to pass a resolution that would block its release, though it failed in a vote earlier this month.
There was also disagreement within the House Ethics committee about whether to release the report after Gaetz resigned from the House and they no longer had jurisdiction. The panel’s chairman, Rep. Michael Guest, was among those who objected to the report’s release. “While I do not challenge the Committee’s findings, I did not vote to support the release of the report and I take great exception that the majority deviated from the Committee’s well-established standards and voted to release a report on an individual no longer under the Committee’s jurisdiction, an action the Committee has not taken since 2006,” he said in a statement.
All of this brought to mind another recent investigation: the brand new 93-page report released by Democratic staff members of the Judiciary Committee, detailing yet more ethics violations committed by Justice Clarence Thomas. Amid the new revelations were two additional trips paid for by Thomas’ billionaire patron Harlan Crow that had not been disclosed, even as Thomas has scrambled to amend his various filings to keep up with journalism. The new trips came to light only because the committee had subpoenaed Crow.
Thomas doesn’t bother to insist that he has done nothing wrong, because there is no reason to. The court’s new ethics rules are wholly non-binding and advisory. Yet the people who have insisted that there is no reason to investigate Thomas include his lawyer (and portrait companion) Mark Paoletta, Leonard Leo (who appears in the same portrait), Mike Davis, John Yoo, the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page and many others. In the face of ample and mounting evidence that Justice Thomas has committed years of shocking ethical violations and violated federal disclosure laws while enriching himself and his family, these superfans continue to blame the investigators for daring to unearth more misconduct.
We are now on the brink of an era in which any investigation of any Republican will be stymied, and in which the investigators themselves will stand accused of misconduct. The very same people accusing the Justice Department of launching politically motivated witch hunts plan to use the Justice Department to launch politically motivated witch hunts. And the selfsame entities are doing their level best to stop the free press from reporting on anything they don’t like, including the fruits of these investigations.
The right has slid from justifying powerful public figures’ misconduct to offering up creepy Orwellian insistences that any and all investigations into their conduct—by way of bipartisan government bodies, an FBI tasked with conducting background checks, or legal inquiries—are an affront to justice itself. We have achieved peak “all investigations are fake news,” even when these investigations lead—as they did in Thomas’ case—to unearthing new ethics violations, or—as they did in Gaetz’ case—to evidence of drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and blatant betrayals of constituents.
It’s depressing that Republicans genuinely seem to believe that the public does not want to know what happens in secret, and also that those who suppress the truth will face no consequences. They seem to cynically assume that nobody cares about corruption, abuse and self-dealing, so long as it’s your team engaging in it—and that reputational harm to government institutions doesn’t matter, because in the end, government doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Anyone and everyone who has dismissed, discredited, or attempted to suppress the Gaetz and Thomas investigations should be asked whether they still believe these men are fit to serve in the high offices for which they were nominated. They should have to explain why the investigation was flawed—or why they believe the alleged conduct is just fine. Otherwise we are barreling toward a future in which all Republican investigations are lawful and everything else, including journalism, is not.
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