The media frenzy was caused by his fraudster pal, the January 6 committee, and Gaetz himself.
The media frenzy was caused by his fraudster pal, the January 6 committee, and Gaetz himself.
I am an advocate of FBI reform. Unlike many of the bureau’s other champions-turned-critics, I’ve identified what I believe is the problem that has corrupted the FBI in the 21st century — namely, its conversion from a police into an intelligence agency — and I’ve proposed a remedy: removing the FBI’s foreign-counterintelligence (FCI) mission and making it solely a law-enforcement agency (with the FCI mission handed off to an intelligence agency that is vested with no police powers, à la Britain’s MI-5).
There is, as I’ve conceded, a sweeping-reform argument that seeks root-and-branch dismantling of the FBI, stressing that the bureau began as the embodiment of its creator, J. Edgar Hoover, and has never renounced that disreputable legacy (indeed, its headquarters is the J. Edgar Hoover Building). My friend Charles C. W. Cooke makes this case with his customary persuasive force in a recent column. Ultimately, I am not convinced. At this point in history (with the federal government’s law-enforcement role so much more extensive than it was in the early 20th century, when the FBI emerged), we need to have a principal federal law-enforcement agency. The main objective, I think we all agree, is to change how the bureau does business, not the name on the door. As Charlie often points out, he comes at things from a defense perspective, and his proposed reforms (in addition to scrapping the FBI) are consistent with that perspective. I’ll address those proposals, from my admittedly pro-prosecution perspective, in a separate column.
For now, I want to focus on the controversy that has triggered the latest calls for overhauling the FBI. A few days ago, the New York Times’ estimable Bret Stephens caused a stir by not just calling for reform but premising that call on the apparent collapse of the sex-trafficking investigation of Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican and staunch Trump ally. Stephens portrayed the Gaetz probe as “an FBI disgrace for the ages,” without specifying, however, what he thinks the FBI did wrong. He linked to Devlin Barrett’s Washington Post report on the likely closing of the investigation without charges, but that report details no FBI wrongdoing, either.
To be sure, the bureau has itself to blame for the bandwagon of condemnation now headed its way. Charlie’s lengthy historical indictment of FBI malfeasance explains why. Yes, it’s a one-sided account and the bureau has done a lot of good, but the cited episodes are as indefensible as they are defining. Still, that indictment omits mention of a single that thing the FBI did wrong in connection with Gaetz — which is a significant omission if Gaetz is to be the catalyst for overhaul. It’s the kind of case Charlie would reject as a matter of principle if the FBI were a criminal defendant: They’ve done it before, so they must have done it this time, too.
Despite the absence of incriminating detail, Charlie maintains: “What the FBI did to Matt Gaetz is precisely what it did to Donald Trump.” Huh? Assuming this is a reference to the Russiagate investigation, let’s recap: FBI leadership, while exhibiting patent political bias, opened a probe based on no credible evidence that Trump was conspiring with the Kremlin, pursued it (in the main) under the auspices of counterintelligence authorities in the expectation that the dearth of evidence would remain secret, and tried to advance it by serially lying to a federal court to obtain surveillance warrants. FBI leadership made public statements, including before Congress, that led the nation to believe there was a serious criminal case against Trump (even when its investigation had turned up nothing incriminating) while privately assuring Trump that he was not a suspect.
Nothing even resembling that was done to Matt Gaetz. The FBI opened an investigation based on an allegation of wrongdoing that was ostensibly credible: Joel Greenberg, a close friend and political crony of Gaetz’s, not only implicated Gaetz (among others) in a sex-trafficking scheme but also pled guilty to it. The probe was opened strictly as a criminal matter (not as a secret counterintelligence investigation), which meant that if Gaetz were ever charged, there would be disclosure of government wrongdoing, if any, in discovery. Because of the public relationship between the two men, once Greenberg pled guilty, the FBI could not have stopped press speculation about Gaetz’s complicity even if it wanted to. As it happened, however, Greenberg went public about Gaetz’s involvement. So did Gaetz himself and his detractors on Capitol Hill, who are numerous and across party lines. The ensuing media frenzy was inevitable given Gaetz’s closeness to Trump and high-profile involvement in the “stop the steal” chicanery that led up to the Capitol riot.
But, as I couldn’t help noticing while listening to the Editors podcast on the subject — where everyone was so very careful to emphasize that the claims about Gaetz were just allegations and that he is presumed innocent — everyone seems quite willing to convict the FBI, without proof, for smearing Gaetz.
No one could credibly allege as to Gaetz, as one could as to Trump, that the claims against him were a fever dream derived from partisan opposition research. The Gaetz probe petered out, evidently, because it could not be established with confidence that the girl involved was a minor at the time of the most germane events — i.e., not because the allegedly salacious events never happened, but because investigators could not conclude that they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt the charge of trafficking minors. What’s more, despite the incriminating information from Greenberg, which was at least partially corroborated, the FBI and Justice Department did not rashly charge Gaetz; they did their work beneath the din, and it appears to have been the evidence developed by the FBI that convinced prosecutors to drop the case.
Ordinarily in this situation, National Review would claim that public officials must be held to a higher standard than whether they can be convicted in a criminal trial. We’d be saying that, regardless of the outcome of any criminal investigation, the colorable suspicions about Congressman Gaetz were a matter of legitimate public concern that journalists and perhaps Congress should scrutinize. Should we stop talking about Hunter Biden because he’s presumed innocent? He is under investigation, after all. Is this, and the fact he has been sullied in the court of public opinion, the FBI’s fault? (To the best of our knowledge, FBI bosses have bent over backward to shield Hunter from scrutiny.)
The FBI is no more responsible for Matt Gaetz’s troubles than it is for Hunter Biden’s laptop. Gaetz is a flamboyant politician of the wannabe enfant terrible sort. It was not unforeseeable that he would get caught up in a sex scandal, and it was certain that, if that happened, it would become known. When it did happen, he was not a bit unhappy about the suggestion that he was quite the ladies’ man during what he describes as “my lifestyle of yesteryear.” His quarrel was with the claim that one of the ladies was 17 years old.
Gaetz brags that he did have sex with a 17-year-old, but only when he, too, was a 17-year-old. The smug self-regard is totally in character. The FBI didn’t generate the Gaetz scandal, much less slander him. As he puts it, “my political opponents want to sensationalize and criminalize my prior sex life,” which he wants everyone to know was sensational — so much so that he felt compelled to defend California Democrat Katie Hill when a sex scandal drove her from office. Here’s Gaetz again: “I defended [Hill’s] ‘throuple’ when her own Democratic colleagues wouldn’t.” I guess that’s for the consumption of all those now emoting the old Ray Donovan line (that’s the real Ray Donovan, kids): Where does poor Matt Gaetz go “to get his reputation back?” Such dudgeon would be laughable in this instance were it not for the sudden haste to make his plight the FBI’s doing.
In considering whether that charge holds up, let’s recall what got the investigation started — which I wrote about when the news broke last year.
The case was opened under the Trump Justice Department, when the FBI was overseen by Attorney General Bill Barr, who was aware of the investigation, made sure to keep it quiet (just as the Hunter Biden investigation was kept quiet), and reportedly avoided being seen publicly in Gaetz’s company. Gaetz’s pal Greenberg, who used to be the tax collector for Seminole County, Fla., pled guilty in May 2021 to an array of charges, including sex-trafficking. Appropriately, the Biden Justice Department did not refer to anyone other than Greenberg by name when (in conjunction with the FBI, the Secret Service, and other agencies) it announced the guilty plea. Greenberg was looking at a dozen years in federal prison. Apparently desperate to get this likely sentence reduced, he struck a deal with prosecutors, implicating Gaetz in the sex-trafficking. Allegedly, this involved a 17-year-old girl who had been brought across state lines for trysts with Gaetz, Greenberg, and others.
Gaetz, from the moment the story became public, strenuously denied that he was guilty of a crime. But how did it become public? First, unidentified people who were aware of the investigation alerted the New York Times, which in March 2021 published a report about it. I suspect the leaks came from the Greenberg and Gaetz camps, not the FBI or DOJ. Why? Because (a) Greenberg appears to have been in plea negotiations with the government at the time, and his lawyer was soon publicly insisting that Congressman Gaetz was implicated; and (b) Gaetz, who likely knew of Greenberg’s predicament, used the Times report as the springboard toward a Fox News appearance in which he sought to shape public opinion. In that television appearance, Gaetz insisted the case was not really about sex-trafficking; it was an “extortion” attempt against him and his family.
Note that, by that time, the FBI had been investigating Gaetz for nearly a year without leaking anything, which at any rate would not have been in the FBI’s interests — when it appears to have been investigating both Greenberg’s claims and the attempt to squeeze money out of Gaetz’s family. The case only became public when Greenberg and Gaetz had reason to know Greenberg would be charged and would have a motive to inculpate Gaetz.
Second, in the plea bargain Justice Department prosecutors struck with Greenberg, they dropped 27 charges to induce him to plead guilty to the sex-trafficking crime (and to sundry fraud charges). Any sensible person who read the publicly filed charging documents and was aware of the Gaetz–Greenberg ties would have inferred that Greenberg’s deal, with its cooperation terms, contemplated a potential case against Gaetz. Indeed, Gaetz by then had already acknowledged being under investigation. It would have been the prosecutors, not the FBI, who decided to let Greenberg dispose of the case against him with a guilty plea that included cooperation and dismissed many of the charges. That is not the FBI’s call — and unlike during the Hillary Clinton–emails caper, there is no reason to believe the FBI tried to usurp the Justice Department’s charging authority.
Third, Greenberg’s lawyer, Fritz Scheller, who had a motive to sell his client’s cooperation as “substantial” (for sentencing leniency under federal guidelines), immediately made public statements about how his client’s plea deal was bad news for Gaetz. In fact, to this day, Scheller maintains that the evidence against Gaetz is strong and expresses skepticism about reports that the DOJ is dropping the matter.
Fourth, according to at least one news report (by Axios), Gaetz last year told confidants that he might not seek reelection; instead, he was considering leaving before his term was up to take a job as a commentator at Newsmax. We don’t know if this report was accurate, but there is no reason to believe it came from an FBI leak. It was fair to infer from the report that Gaetz was concerned about the possibility of being indicted over his conduct.
What else have we heard about Gaetz that portrayed him as guilty in the court of public opinion? There was the bizarre scheme in which a Florida businessman named Stephen Alford tried to defraud Gaetz’s father (prominent Florida politician Don Gaetz) into paying $25 million to secure a pardon for the congressman. The scheme was to convince the elder Gaetz that if he paid the sum, it would be used in a covert attempt to rescue Robert Levinson, a former government agent held hostage in Iran (and presumed dead, notwithstanding Alford’s claims to the contrary). This assistance would, supposedly, make a hero of Matt Gaetz and sway President Biden to pardon him.
Don Gaetz reported the entreaty to the FBI and apparently cooperated in the ensuing investigation. Alford ultimately pled guilty and was sentenced to over five years’ imprisonment. It turned out that Gaetz had been substantially right when he told Fox News that his family was being pressured. But, of course, saying so implied that there was something with which to pressure his family — namely, the sex-trafficking investigation. In any event, the publicity was against the FBI’s interests. The bureau would have wanted things kept quiet to maintain whatever cooperation it was getting from Don Gaetz in its effort to make the fraud case against Alford.
Beyond that, the House January 6 committee has alleged, in its summer 2022 hearings, that Gaetz is among the GOP congressmen who sought pardons in the weeks before then-president Trump left office. Gaetz is said to have requested cover against possible charges in the sex-trafficking probe. But, again, this is not a case of the FBI’s leaking information. The allegations that a pardon was sought came from a Democrat-controlled congressional committee, on the basis of its interviews with Trump White House staffers. (We must also observe, because the January 6 committee has misleadingly equated inquiry about a pardon with consciousness of guilt, that Gaetz reportedly continued to maintain his innocence but wanted to be pardoned because the investigation was damaging him.)
The recent Washington Post reporting about the sex-trafficking investigation of Gaetz attributes the apparent collapse of the case to steep credibility problems with the two main witnesses: Greenberg and the alleged victim — the 17-year-old who, according to at least some unidentified sources, was in fact 18 at the time of some, if not all, of the suspected interaction with Gaetz.
I’m no Pollyanna. I’ve lived through this same decade of FBI hijinks as Bret Stephens and Charlie Cooke have, and I am equally well-versed in sordid chapters of the bureau’s history. Would it stun me if we eventually learn that there were some FBI missteps? Of course not. Perhaps we will learn that the bureau should have figured out, months earlier than it did, that the witnesses were unreliable. But that’s a reach — there’s no timetable (other than the five-year statute of limitations) for deciding to close an investigation without charges, and those decisions often take longer than most of us would think they should.
Or perhaps we’ll learn that the FBI agents pushed for charges against Gaetz, but the prosecutors rebuffed them. There is no such indication at this point, but, even if that’s how it happened, such disagreements are common: When FBI agents invest months in an investigation and a conviction is plausible, the bureau wants the case to be charged; the prosecutors, who will be blamed in case of acquittal, want the case to be stronger than plausible. Still, no matter what discussions may have taken place, if the case has been dropped, it is because the FBI developed evidence that called the witnesses’ credibility into question. By contrast, the problem in the reprehensible Carter Page investigation was that the FBI concealed evidence that undermined witnesses’ credibility.
I believe, as do Bret Stephens and Charlie Cooke, that the FBI needs reform. I agree that there need to be thorough congressional inquiries into the FBI’s mission and its performance. In fact, I’m predisposed to believe the bureau should be taken out of the foreign-counterintelligence business and confined to police work — a tough but vital mission, and one suited to its law-enforcement ethos. All that said, however, I don’t see any evidence of FBI malfeasance in the Matt Gaetz investigation.