Last month, GOP lawmakers blocked efforts to release the House Ethics Committee's report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz. But just weeks later, two of the five Republicans on the committee flipped. Centrist Reps. Dave Joyce of Ohio, whom Gaetz had attacked, and Andrew Garbarino of New York had a change of heart so that when the issue came to another vote this month, they sided with the panel's five Democrat members, leaving Chair Michael Guest and Reps. Michelle Fischbach and John Rutherford on the outskirts, Axios reports. That was despite House Speaker Mike Johnson urging that the report be kept under wraps.
In a one-page dissent included with the report, Guest wrote that the three outliers "do not challenge the Committee's finding" that the Florida Republican engaged in prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, and obstruction of Congress, but "we 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," per the Hill. Gaetz resigned from Congress shortly after the panel's November vote, which was prompted by President-elect Trump's nomination of Gaetz to be attorney general and lawmakers' calls for information on the allegations against him.
However, the report cites "a few prior instances where the Committee has determined that it was in the public interest to release its findings even after a Member's resignation from Congress," per USA Today. Of the findings that Gaetz twice paid for sex with a 17-year-old when he was 35 and used illicit drugs on multiple occasions, a Democrat on the panel, Rep. Glenn Ivey, tells the outlet, "The public had the right to know this sort of thing," especially amid talk that Gaetz might run for Marco Rubio's Senate seat. It's also useful information for sitting lawmakers, Ivey notes. "It gives them guidance as to how they should conduct themselves going forward." (More Matt Gaetz stories.)
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