‘Big middle finger’: The truth behind Donald Trump’s controversial selection of Matt Gaetz to be attorney-general
One of Donald Trump’s confidants has revealed the true motive behind his most controversial selection for a key government role.
One of Donald Trump’s confidants, his first White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, has shed new light on one of the US President-elect’s most controversial cabinet nominations.
Mr Priebus, a former head of the Republican National Committee, served as Mr Trump’s chief of staff in the White House for about six months at the start of his first term. He was replaced by John Kelly, a Marine general, who has gone on to become a fierce critic of Mr Trump.
Mr Priebus took a different path, remaining publicly loyal to Mr Trump, and continuing to speak with and advise him in private.
Speaking to America’s ABC News today, Mr Priebus was asked about some of Mr Trump’s more contentious picks for key government jobs.
There are several from which to choose.
The President-elect has picked former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a military veteran but has no intelligence experience, to be the director of national intelligence, despite her history of sympathetic remarks about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The DNI position was created after the 9/11 terror attacks to oversee all of America’s intelligence agencies, and to act as their liaison with the president, the thinking being that agencies had not communicated or co-operated enough, previously.
Mr Trump has selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr, an outspoken anti-vaxxer and spreader of quite a few health-related conspiracy theories, to lead America’s federal health department.
Having interviewed Mr Kennedy at length, the conservative New York Post paper recently concluded he was “nuts on a lot of fronts”, and said his views on health policy were “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories”.
Mr Trump has chosen the Fox News TV host Pete Hegseth, another military veteran, to be head of the Department of Defence, which employs 700,000 civilians and oversees about 2.5 million military personnel.
That makes it one of the world’s biggest bureaucracies, whose leader holds more responsibility than most countries’ heads of state. Mr Hegseth has no executive experience whatsoever.
But of all Mr Trump’s nominees, the one most likely to face a struggle when it comes to his confirmation, which requires assent from the US Senate, is Matt Gaetz.
Until last week, when he abruptly resigned, Mr Gaetz was a congressman representing a district in Florida. Now he is the President-elect’s nominee to become America’s chief law enforcement officer, the federal attorney-general.
Mr Gaetz’s nomination has been contentious for more than one reason. First is his thin resume: he graduated from law school in 2007 and worked in private practice for about two years before entering politics. That is the full extent of his legal experience.
Then there is the awkward fact that Mr Gaetz has been under investigation by the House of Representatives’ ethics committee over allegations that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, and dispensed special privileges and favours to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship”.
When Mr Gaetz suddenly resigned from Congress last week, a couple of days before the committee’s report was due to be released, even his own side assumed he was trying to avoid the looming likelihood of it becoming public. Now that Mr Gaetz no longer in Congress, and therefore no longer subject to its ethics rules, the report may never see the light of day.
He was previously subject to a criminal investigation, as part of a much broader sex trafficking case, into whether he had sex illegally with a teenage girl. That investigation was ultimately closed without charges being brought against him.
We have heard from some senior Republicans, since the Gaetz pick was announced, who feel it’s a gambit; that Mr Trump chose an obviously unacceptable nominee for attorney-general to make it easier for Senate Republicans to approve his other picks.
The theory here is that, by rejecting Mr Gaetz, Mr Trump’s fellow Republicans will earn themselves enough political capital, and enough of an impression of independence, to affirm other dubious nominees like Ms Gabbard and Mr Kennedy.
That, at last, is all the context you need for Mr Priebus’s remarks today.
The upshot is: no, it’s not a gambit. It’s not some cunning plot to give his colleagues a semblance of political cover. Mr Trump does genuinely want Mr Gaetz to run America’s sprawling Justice Department.
“Reince, you told me you talked to Donald Trump, just yesterday, about some of these more controversial nominees. Is he going to double down, is he backing off at all?” the ABC host Martha Raddatz asked Mr Trump’s former chief of staff, on the show This Week.
“No,” Mr Priebus replied.
“He made it very clear to me that the Matt Gaetz pick is not three-dimensional chess to help another nominee get through. That this was what he wanted to have happen.
“A couple of quick things. Number one, you have to remember Donald Trump spent the last couple of years going in and out of courtrooms, getting Mar-a-Lago raided. I mean, part of the reason why the (former and future) first lady, Melania Trump, didn’t go meet with Jill Biden was, ‘Hey, you raided, you know, my bedroom. You want me to have tea with you?’
“So, he feels like he has gone to hell and back ten times. So, this is also a big middle finger to the DOJ and the FBI.
“The Gaetz play, and all these other administration nominees, come after four years of being through the gauntlet.”
Mr Priebus was alluding to an event last week at the White House, at which current President Joe Biden hosted Mr Trump. There could have been an adjacent meeting between current First Lady Jill Biden and Melania Trump, but Mrs Trump declined to attend.
“She ain’t going,” a source described as “familiar with Melania’s decision” told The New York Post at the time.
“Jill Biden’s husband authorised the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting.
“Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet.”
We’re talking, here, about the FBI’s raid on the Trumps’ Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, in 2022. As far as we know, pending any evidence offered to the contrary, neither of the Bidens actually had anything to do with that raid; the FBI obtained a search warrant from a judge through the usual legal means, and Attorney-General Merrick Garland signed off on it.
The sequence of events, as alleged by the indictment against Donald Trump (which is now, by the way, almost certainly dead in the water due to his election win), is this: when he left the White House in 2021, Mr Trump took with him boxes full of government documents, some of them classified as top secret.
At this point Mr Trump, no longer president, was a private citizen. The documents in question did not belong to him any more than they belong to you or I; they were government property.
He is alleged to have stored them at two of his properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida and his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and to have occasionally shown them to guests.
The government spent more than a year trying to retrieve them by asking politely, and was eventually driven to seek a subpoena which required Mr Trump, by law, to return them.
Mr Trump eventually handed some over, and had his lawyer sign a declaration saying all the sensitive documents in question had been returned. This was allegedly untrue. Some remained in his possession.
Learning this, the FBI decided to raid Mar-a-Lago and seize the remaining documents.
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