The Justice Department has decided not to pursue a potential criminal case against Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican and Trump ally. The New York Times reported that decision this afternoon, based on information from three informed sources it did not name. By this point, that outcome seems like a foregone conclusion.
Gaetz was implicated in a sex-trafficking probe, which was said to involve the solicitation of women online, including one minor (allegedly 17 years old during at least some of the relevant time). The investigation began during the Trump administration. The spotlight on Gaetz was intensified when a Florida friend of his, former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, pled guilty in May 2021 to charges of child sex trafficking, identity theft, wire fraud, embezzlement from the state revenue office, and defrauding the federal coronavirus loan program.
The plea bargain, which exposed Greenberg to a maximum 12-year sentence, called for cooperation that could have reduced such prison time. Greenberg’s attorney was very public in maintaining that Greenberg’s plea deal was bad news for Gaetz. Nevertheless, as I pointed out at the time, Gaetz was neither named nor referred to in the charges to which Greenberg pled guilty, nor was he alluded to in Greenberg’s guilty-plea allocution (i.e., what a defendant says when the judge asks him to explain, in his own words, what he did that makes him guilty). The latter was noteworthy because when prosecutors anticipate calling a pleading defendant as an accomplice witness in a future case, they usually have the accomplice implicate his co-conspirators.
Reports that the Justice Department had abandoned any thought of charging Gaetz began to emerge last year. The non-prosecution outcome seemed certain when Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment on December 1, 2022. When prosecutors anticipate charging someone based largely on an accomplice’s testimony, they typically delay the accomplice’s sentencing until after he has testified in that person’s trial, and the testimony typically results in a sentence significantly lower than the maximum exposure.
In the interim, the Washington Post’s Devlin Barrett reported last September that career prosecutors had recommended against an indictment of Gaetz. That led to some controversy when commentators – prominently including the Bret Stephens of the Times – pilloried the FBI because the sex-trafficking suspicions of Gaetz had become public despite what was apparently weak evidence. I countered that there was no indication that the FBI had leaked the suspicions against Gaetz; rather, the case drew public attention because of interviews given by Greenberg’s lawyer and by Gaetz himself.
Some of the attention stemmed from a bizarre case in which a Florida businessman named Stephen Alford tried to defraud Gaetz’s father (prominent Florida pol Don Gaetz) into paying $25 million to secure a pardon for Gaetz — the farfetched notion being that President Biden would pardon Gaetz out of gratitude because his father’s millions would by then have been used to rescue Robert Levinson (a former government agent who was held hostage in Iran and was actually presumed dead). People rolled their eyes when Gaetz publicly claimed his family was being squeezed. But after the Gaetzes reported the incident to the FBI, Alford was investigated and ultimately pled guilty. He was sentenced to a five-year prison term.
The House January 6 committee alleged last summer that Gaetz was among several supporters of the effort to overturn Biden’s 2020 election victory to seek a pardon from Trump. Testimony elicited by the committee indicated that Gaetz had been seeking a pardon since early December 2020 — i.e., weeks before the January 6 Capitol riot. It was thus speculated that Gaetz could have been seeking a pardon in connection, not with the 2020 election, but the Justice Department’s then-ongoing investigation.
It is all supposition, though: Trump never pardoned Gaetz, and there is no evidence that Gaetz sought a pardon through the formal process. To the contrary, he consistently and vigorously maintained his innocence over many months of public statements.