The Matt Gaetz Report Is Finally Out—and Every Bit of It Is Terrible

The long-awaited House Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz is out, and it finds that the former Florida representative did have sex with an underage girl, among many other offenses. 

The committee found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” and that he “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.” The report also mentioned that Gaetz possessed and used cocaine and ecstasy while in office, and even lied to the State Department about the identity of one of his sexual partners so that she could get a passport. 

“Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report stated. Even still, it found no evidence that Gaetz was involved in sex trafficking, as the women were over 18 when they traveled.

The report also noted that “nearly every woman that the Committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption.”

At least one woman told the committee that drugs at the events with Gaetz may have “impair[ed their] ability to really know what was going on or fully consent.”

Among other charges, Gaetz was also found to have accepted an illegal gift via a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, lodgings included, which exceeded the amount allowed for members of Congress.

Gaetz has denied all allegations, even going so far as to request a restraining order against the House Ethics Committee.  

“Giving funds to someone you are dating - that they didn’t ask for - and that isn’t ‘charged’ for sex is now prostitution?!?” Gaetz wrote on X ahead of the report’s release. “There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses.”

Not content with trying to incorporate Canada, President-elect Donald Trump has set his sights further north to Greenland. Too bad it’s not for sale.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede told Trump Monday to back off his outlandish bid to control the world’s biggest island. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” Egede said in a written comment.

In a post on Sunday, the president-elect announced that Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal and former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term, would serve as the ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark, which holds control of the semiautonomous Greenland. He also re-upped a bid to take Greenland off its hands.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump previously floated the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland in 2019, which the Danish prime minister at the time called “absurd.” His megalomaniacal musings never came to anything, and likely won’t this time around either.

Greenland is home to the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base that, among other things, “detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of strategic missile warning and missile defense,” according to its website.

Greenland is strategically significant to the U.S because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York. It’s also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian navy’s northern fleet operates.

U.S. expansion seemed to be on Trump’s mind Sunday, and the geopolitical mastermind also threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, which has been the property of Panama since 1999. “Welcome to the United States Canal!” Trump captioned a photograph of the canal in a post on Truth Social Sunday.

Earlier this month, when facing criticism about his plan for harsh tariffs on Canadian imports, Trump made a crack about Canada becoming the 51st state. The last time the U.S. tried to make a play for Canada, the British burned down the U.S. Capitol.

It’s difficult to consider Trump’s latest imperialist dreams as anything other than a distraction from his sinister plans stateside—which include violently rounding up undocumented immigrants into camps and deporting them en masse.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz is filing a restraining order against the entire House Ethics Committee to stop them from showing the world their findings, which reportedly includes evidence that he paid an underage girl for sex.

Gaetz accuses the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen through the threatened release of an investigative report containing potentially defamatory allegations, in violation of the Committee’s own rules.”

This is the result of a yearslong investigation into allegations that Gaetz had paid a teenage girl and multiple women thousands of dollars for sex and drugs since 2017.

This is a developing story.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz is filing a restraining order against the entire House Ethics Committee to stop them from showing the world their findings, which reportedly includes evidence that he paid an underaged girl for sex.

Gaetz accuses the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen through the threatened release of an investigative report containing potentially defamatory allegations, in violation of the Committee’s own rules.”

This all comes after CNN reported last week that the committee secretly voted to release its report into former Representative Matt Gaetz. The report is years long, and based on allegations that Gaetz had paid a teenage girl and multiple women thousands of dollars for sex and drugs since 2017.

Gaetz’s restraining order request states that the report would be unjustly tarnishing his reputation, arguing that it is “concerning matters of sexual propriety and other acts of alleged moral turpitude constitutes irreparable harm that cannot be adequately remedied through monetary damages.”

The clerk’s office has already told Gaetz his lawsuit must be refiled, as Gaetz’s attorneys made paperwork errors that must be corrected before it goes any further.

Gaetz has fervently denied any and all allegations.

“In my single days, I often sent funds to women I dated—even some I never dated but who asked. I dated several of these women for years. I NEVER had sexual contact with someone under 18. Any claim that I have would be destroyed in court—which is why no such claim was ever made in court,” Gaetz wrote last week. “It’s embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life. I live a different life now.”

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump dismissed the “President Musk” jokes Sunday, and it was less than convincing.

During his address at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona, the president-elect pushed back on claims that Musk planned to supplant him as president.

“No, he’s not gonna be president, that I can tell you,” Trump said. “And I’m safe, you know why? He can’t be, he wasn’t born in this country.”

But Trump carefully elided the actual criticism of Musk’s growing political influence. People aren’t worried that Musk is plotting to steal the presidency—they’re worried he already has.

Last week, Musk issued his own set of marching orders to Congress, ordering Republicans to oppose a massive spending bill to avert a government shutdown, or face being primaried by a Musk-backed candidate. Meanwhile, Trump stayed more or less silent, and Democratic leaders began to criticize the president-elect for allowing Musk to lead his party.

When Trump eventually did weigh in, also issuing a request to lift the debt ceiling, his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt issued a chilly statement to make sure everyone knew there was only one man in charge.

“As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view. President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop,” said Leavitt.

Only when both Musk and Trump approved of the spending bill was it able to move forward. While the changes Musk sought were made, Trump’s request got left on the cutting room floor.

Musk’s recent behavior indicates not only a growing influence on Trump, but on the Republican Party at large, as Republicans immediately fell in line. Already, many have begun pledging themselves to assist the unelected bureaucrat with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a scheme to eradicate federal programs and workers and replace them with pricey corporate contracts and vendors.

The House of Representatives finally voted to avert a government shutdown Friday evening, just hours before government funding was set to expire, thanks to Democratic help and Republicans’ decision to exclude Donald Trump’s demand to extend the debt ceiling.

The bill to continue funding for the government passed with 366 votes in favor and 34 votes against, with every single “no” vote coming from a Republican.

This most recent vote comes one day after a whopping 38 Republicans joined 197 Democrats in voting against an abbreviated continuing resolution, endorsed by both Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

That bill had nixed several key provisions from the original, including ones to fund research into pediatric cancer, premature labor, and Down syndrome; to treat sickle-cell anemia and early cancer detection; and criminalize deepfake pornography.

The original 1,547-page bipartisan bill was scrapped Wednesday, after Musk railed against it on social media and Trump demanded that Republicans find a way to lift the debt ceiling, sending an embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson scrambling to come up with a new version of the legislation.

The massive bill underwent several stages on Friday, having been split up into three component parts for lawmakers to vote on separately: a three-month continuing resolution, a bill funding disaster relief, and a bill to grant $10 billion in relief for farmers and extend the farmer’s bill, while Trump’s request to raise the debt ceiling was nowhere to be found.

In the end, lawmakers voted on one single package, which would fund the government through March 14, provide roughly $100 billion for disaster aid, and extend the federal programs supporting farmers, providing $30 billion in economic relief.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a simple fix for the current government shutdown battle.

“How about the House add campaign finance reform to the CR so Republicans and Democrats alike can stop being so scared about what a billionaire man-child thinks before they vote on anything around here,” AOC wrote on X Friday.

The “billionaire man-child” in question is Elon Musk, who has been threatening to primary any representatives who don’t back his preferred version of the spending bill. Musk helped tank the bipartisan spending bill on Wednesday through a barrage of posts on X, and on Thursday, a Trump-backed bill failed to win over enough Republicans. On Friday afternoon, Musk again began hinting at his opposition to the revised Republican plan.

Musk’s outside role in these negotiations has called into question who’s really calling the shots in the Republican Party.

“The leader of the GOP is Elon Musk,” Representative Brendan Boyle wrote on X. “I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office,” said Representative Greg Cesar.

Roger Stone said Friday he wants to fix America’s broken justice system, conveniently forgetting the time he got bailed out of criminal charges by his buddy Donald Trump.

During Stone’s address at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix, the longtime GOP operative and self-proclaimed “agent provocateur” explained what he believed Trump’s allies hope to gain from a second stint in the White House.

“What we seek is a rebalance of the scales of justice, so this country can return to one standard of justice, not the two-tiered justice system,” Stone said in a video posted on X by CBS News’s senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs.

It’s sort of unclear to which two-tiered justice system Stone was referring—could it possibly have been the one that secured him a presidential pardon after he was indicted for lying to Congress about Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential election, witness tampering, and obstruction? The very same system that rescued him, the president-elect’s longtime friend and ally, from a 40-month prison sentence? Surely not that one, right?

There are certainly serious problems with the country’s justice system worthy of the attention of the president of the United States—but Stone’s not talking about those. No, he’s most likely talking about the system that pardoned Hunter Biden for gun charges and tax evasion, or the system that pursued charges against the rioters at the January 6 insurrection, whose violence Stone cheered on.

Ultimately, MAGA is not seeking to “rebalance the scales”; it’s seeking to throw the scale out and do whatever the hell Trump wants. But if Stone is seriously interested in being prosecuted for tax evasion, the Justice Department can definitely make that happen.

Elon Musk is hoping to dispel the widely circulating notion that he, not President-elect Trump, is really calling the shots.

On Thursday, X user Lulu Cheng Meservey called such speculations indicative of a wider “strategy” to sow discord between Musk and Trump. “By jabbing Trump about not being the alpha, the idea is to provoke him to sideline Elon and to fray the relationship,” Meservey wrote.

Musk agreed, writing in a quote-tweet Friday, “The political & legacy media puppets all got their new instructions yesterday and are now parroting the same message to drive a wedge between [Trump] and me. They will fail.”

The “President Musk” rhetoric began after the billionaire, whose financial support for Trump and other Republican candidates made him 2024’s biggest political donor, helped tank a bipartisan spending bill. Musk unleashed a fusillade of criticism on his social media platform, X, as well as a threat to fund primary challenges against representatives who voted to pass the deal.

Later that day, President-elect Trump came out against the deal, and after a failed vote on a revised bill Thursday, House Republicans are scrambling to put together an eleventh-hour plan to avoid a government shutdown.

Musk has since tried to shift blame and downplay his role in the outcome. He’s also apparently hoping to shut down Democrats’ suggestions that his outsize role in the legislative process indicates that he’s the one truly pulling the strings in the incoming Trump administration.

Many Democrats leapt on the events of the week to say just that: “The leader of the GOP is Elon Musk,” tweeted Representative Brendan Boyle. “I don’t know why Trump doesn’t just hand him the Oval Office,” said Representative Greg Cesar. “It’s clear who’s in charge, and it’s not President-elect Donald Trump,” posted Pramila Jayapal, saying Trump followed the lead of “Shadow President Elon Musk.” (Jayapal’s were the comments that specifically drew Meservey’s, and in turn Musk’s, ire.)

Whatever the state of Musk and Trump’s relationship after the world’s wealthiest man flexed his political muscles this week, the notion that Musk is delivering marching orders seems to have struck a nerve with team Trump. On Thursday, a Trump spokesperson insisted that the president-elect, and no one else, was in charge, saying, “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”

House Republicans seem poised to give Donald Trump the finger for the second time in less than 24 hours.

Speaker Mike Johnson announced a new continuing resolution plan on Friday that does not include what the president-elect has been pining for for days: an extension to the debt ceiling.

“We have a unified Republican conference. There’s a unanimous agreement in the room that we need to move forward,” Johnson told a room full of reporters. “I will not telegraph to you the specific details of that yet.… I expect that we will be proceeding forward. We will not have a government shutdown.”

Johnson’s new plan, which he has not yet discussed with Trump, will instead be one vote that includes a spending package, disaster aid, farm aid, and the farm bill extension—no debt ceiling changes included. The plan C comes after 38 House Republicans on Thursday evening voted against a Trump-backed plan that would extend the debt ceiling by two years.

Johnson’s move is sure to draw the ire of both Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who has been threatening to primary any Republican who does not agree to a continuing resolution on Trump’s terms (or his).