Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says former Rep. Matt Gaetz, President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee who is accused of paying for sex and sleeping with a 17-year-old, shouldn’t be “disqualified” for his alleged behavior.
Graham, a leading Trump yes-man in the Senate who has begged his fellow Republicans to “give Matt a chance,” sidestepped a question by a CNN reporter about a House Ethics Committee probe into Gaetz’s behavior by trying to attribute the allegations against him to the press.
“No, no, no. Nobody should be disqualified because of a media report,” Graham said Tuesday, when pressed about whether Gaetz is qualified for the country’s top law enforcement job.
While some prominent Republicans senators, including Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), have expressed concern at Gaetz’s nomination, Graham has a history of ingratiating himself with Trump.
After saying the GOP should tell Trump to “go to hell” when he launched his first presidential bid in 2015—describing the real estate tycoon as a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot”—Graham changed his tune to become one of Trump’s most vocal supporters after he took office. Since then he has repeatedly shown himself willing to engage in political contortionism to suit his golf buddy’s MAGA agenda.
As a high-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham may be called upon to be a forceful advocate for Gaetz if Trump remains committed to his nomination. Graham is also frequently deployed to make the case for the president-elect’s policies on cable news.
Anyone backing Gaetz’s nomination will have a difficult case to make.
While the Ethics Committee’s probe into the allegations against Gaetz effectively ended when he resigned from Congress after he was nominated to lead the Department of Justice, some details have already become public.
The committee has also faced calls to release its report on the investigation, including from Joel Leppard, the attorney representing two women who spoke to the Ethics panel.
His clients testified to the committee that the former Florida congressman paid them for “sexual favors,” he said.
Leppard added that one of the women testified she saw Gaetz having sex with an her underage friend of hers in 2017.
Documents obtained by the committee include Venmo records that show Gaetz paid over $10,000 to the two women, ABC reported Tuesday.
Both women were introduced to Gaetz in 2017 through his friend Joel Greenberg, according to Leppard. Greenberg was later sentenced to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor, wire fraud and other crimes.
Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.
The Justice Department declined to charge Gaetz last year over sex trafficking allegations, including that he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl.
To Graham, apparently, all this information merely constitutes “a media report.”
