Matt Gaetz Calls It Quits AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Daily

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Matt Gaetz Calls It Quits) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (The Daily) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

View full AI transcripts and summaries of all podcast episodes on the blog: The Daily

Episode: Matt Gaetz Calls It Quits

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:21:10

Episode Shownotes

After just nine days as Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration.Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The Times, discusses the revelations and the reporting that doomed the prospective nomination of Gaetz, a former representative of Florida.Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for

The New York Times, covering Washington.Background reading: Matt Gaetz withdraws from consideration for attorney general.A federal inquiry traced payments from Gaetz to women.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration for Attorney General after just nine days due to serious allegations, including payments to women linked to a federal inquiry. The episode discusses the implications of the House Ethics Committee's investigation and the pressures Republicans faced in handling Gaetz's nomination amidst scrutiny. His withdrawal not only reflects the complexities of Trump's cabinet choices but also poses significant challenges for Senate confirmation given the allegations against him.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Matt Gaetz Calls It Quits) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_05
From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. After just nine days as Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, former Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida has withdrawn from consideration.

00:00:22 Speaker_05
Today, Mike Schmidt, on the revelations and the reporting that doomed Gaetz's nomination, It's Friday, November 22nd. Mike, welcome back to the studio for your second recording of the day. Sure.

00:00:50 Speaker_05
We had, a couple of hours ago, finished recording a roundtable with four of our colleagues, including you, and Katie Edmondson, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan. Literally, we finished, we said thank you.

00:01:04 Speaker_05
we walk out of this room and we learned that Matt Gaetz was withdrawing as Trump's pick for attorney general because that piece of information rendered our entire conversation out of date. Correct.

00:01:18 Speaker_05
So we want to thank them for their work, which will never be aired. And thank you for sticking around to tell us the rest of this story. Let's go. Okay. So at the start of this week,

00:01:32 Speaker_05
The question, which we had posed in an episode of The Daily about Matt Gaetz, was whether we were going to see the results of a House ethics investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct, including allegedly sex with a minor, and his alleged drug use.

00:01:49 Speaker_05
One of the first things that happened after our episode ran was that the Republican Speaker of the House weighed in on that question. Just start the clock there.

00:02:00 Speaker_04
So, Speaker Johnson came out and said, I don't think this report should be released.

00:02:06 Speaker_04
The Ethics Committee had looked at a range of his different conduct, and they looked like they were coming to the end of their investigation, and they were going to be putting a report out about what they found.

00:02:20 Speaker_04
But the argument that Republicans were making that because Gates had stepped down, because he's no longer a member of Congress, the committee should not release the report.

00:02:31 Speaker_01
We don't issue investigations and ethics reports on people who are not members of Congress. I'm afraid that that would open a Pandora's box because the jurisdiction of the Ethics Committee is limited.

00:02:41 Speaker_05
— Right, and that's the argument that Speaker Mike Johnson puts forward. He says, not a member of the House, not subject to this report ever becoming public. End of discussion.

00:02:52 Speaker_01
— Correct. And I think this would be a breach of protocol that could be dangerous for us going forward in the future.

00:02:58 Speaker_05
— Which is, of course, a victory for Gaetz and for Trump, who's putting him up for AG. And meanwhile, with this report locked up in a cabinet somewhere on Capitol Hill… — Trump calling in his No.

00:03:11 Speaker_03
2 vice president-elect, J.D. Vance, to nudge his soon-to-be former colleagues, the Ohio senator with Gaetz at his side…

00:03:19 Speaker_05
J.D. Vance, the now vice president-elect, shows up on Capitol Hill with Matt Gaetz in tow to, it seemed, start drumming up support for a potential Senate confirmation.

00:03:35 Speaker_08
— It's been going great. The Senate has been giving me a lot of good advice. I'm looking forward to the hearing.

00:03:42 Speaker_04
— As far as it went for the Trump folks, they were moving ahead with their nomination. They were taking their nominee up to Capitol Hill, parading him before senators, and trying to get him confirmed.

00:03:53 Speaker_05
— Trying to make this, in a sense, as normal a ritual as has ever happened with somebody up for a big job in Washington.

00:04:00 Speaker_00
— This just in, a major announcement from Capitol Hill. The House Ethics Committee has voted to not release its report on former Representative Matt Gaetz.

00:04:09 Speaker_04
And in another positive sign for Gates, the Ethics Committee decides not to release a copy of the report.

00:04:18 Speaker_07
Democrats on the committee are furious, saying they want the report out, but the Republicans refused.

00:04:28 Speaker_05
So that's where we are as of Wednesday afternoon, early evening, I believe. And that, Mike, is where you, as you frequently do in these moments, enter the story with your reporting.

00:04:44 Speaker_04
So just describe what happened. So I really wanted to get my hands on the ethics investigation report. You and every other journalist, yeah. But I thought that was gonna be really hard.

00:04:54 Speaker_04
But I knew that there had been a three-year-long Justice Department investigation that looked at whether Gage should be charged for having sex with a 17-year-old girl who was paid for it.

00:05:06 Speaker_04
In the course of my reporting, I learned that the Ethics Committee had obtained a range of information and documentation from that investigation. So my thought was, Could I get my hands on some of the evidence the committee had obtained?

00:05:24 Speaker_04
In the course of that, I got my hands on a document that federal investigators had created as they were looking at Gates. And that document was a chart. A bunch of different faces of people, including Gates and the women.

00:05:39 Speaker_04
and it's lines going from Gates to the women with arrows and dollar figures. Right. And when you step back and take a look at it...

00:05:51 Speaker_04
It's an incredible web and shows the great detail that the investigators went to to try and understand what Gates was doing and who he was sending money to.

00:06:04 Speaker_04
And it was significant because the women had testified to the ethics committee that they had had sex with Gates for money.

00:06:15 Speaker_04
And this document backed that up, because it showed thousands and thousands of dollars in Venmo payments that Gates had made to them. That had been documented by the federal investigators.

00:06:29 Speaker_05
What, if anything, does this document say about the most serious of the accusations that have been made against Gates, which is that he had sex with an underage girl?

00:06:41 Speaker_04
It does not show any payments between Gates and the girl. But it does show that Gates' friend, a guy named Joel Greenberg, who set up many of these encounters, had sent several hundred dollars worth of money to the 17-year-old girl.

00:07:01 Speaker_04
And that was significant because it appeared to back up what Greenberg had told investigators. Which is what? That he and Gates both had sex with the 17-year-old girl for money.

00:07:15 Speaker_05
It seems worth saying this document is residing in a House ethics report, correct me if I'm wrong, that the Speaker of the House and the Republicans on the Ethics Committee have decided that the public should not see, even as it considers Matt Gaetz to be the lead law enforcement official of the United States.

00:07:37 Speaker_04
We don't know if the actual chart is in the final version of the report, but we know that this is what the ethics committee had obtained during their investigation as they were trying to get to the bottom of the allegations.

00:07:52 Speaker_05
I was quite struck by what Gates said when he learned, and those around him learned, that you had this document, Mike, and the response

00:08:02 Speaker_05
And a way to kind of translate it for us is that you possessing this document is why the country needed Matt Gaetz as Attorney General.

00:08:12 Speaker_04
They accused the Justice Department of leaking the document. And they said, the department had investigated Gates for several years, they never charged him, and were essentially now using it to undermine him.

00:08:26 Speaker_04
And it was that type of action, that type of politicalization of investigative work that Gates needed to come into the department to take care of.

00:08:37 Speaker_04
The larger argument they're trying to say is that Donald Trump has been constantly undermined by the deep state and the Justice Department.

00:08:46 Speaker_04
That's what's happening to Matt Gaetz right now, and that's why he has to be Attorney General, because he has to put an end to this type of behavior.

00:08:58 Speaker_05
So all of this ends up being the backdrop as we enter Thursday, the day we are sitting here talking, and the day in which Matt Gaetz, right after we finished recording our roundtable, sends out a tweet.

00:09:12 Speaker_04
He basically says that his confirmation is becoming an unnecessary distraction for the incoming Trump administration. And while he had great meetings on Capitol Hill with senators, he is going to be pulling his nomination.

00:09:32 Speaker_04
And just like that, Matt Gaetz was no longer Donald Trump's nominee to be Attorney General.

00:09:47 Speaker_06
We'll be right back.

00:09:55 Speaker_05
Mike, for Matt Gaetz to have withdrawn as Trump's pick for Attorney General, the Trump team must have concluded that he couldn't win Senate confirmation at a moment when Trump is brimming with self-confidence and reveling in his ability to force controversial cabinet picks through the Senate confirmation process.

00:10:15 Speaker_05
So why exactly do we think that Trump, those around him, reached the conclusion that this pick couldn't get through, that it was doomed.

00:10:26 Speaker_04
This is the track that the nomination was on. If Gates went forward, he was almost certainly going to have to testify before the Senate at a confirmation hearing. At that hearing, he would almost certainly have been asked, have you paid women for sex?

00:10:46 Speaker_04
And that would have put him in the situation of either saying, yes, I did, which would have created a whole storm around it.

00:10:54 Speaker_05
Right, because in theory, it might be the future Attorney General saying under oath that he broke the law.

00:11:00 Speaker_04
Correct. If he said no, the Democrats would almost certainly say, you're under oath and you're perjuring yourself because there's all this other evidence that it indeed did happen.

00:11:14 Speaker_04
And the third option he would have had, which most lawyers probably would have counseled him to do, is to have taken the Fifth Amendment. So you would have had a potential incoming Attorney General

00:11:29 Speaker_04
taking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination as he answered questions under oath before Congress about a federal investigation into him as he was trying to become the Attorney General.

00:11:42 Speaker_05
Right. That, as they say, is a sticky wicket.

00:11:45 Speaker_04
That's just quite something even by the measures of the Trump story.

00:11:50 Speaker_05
And no matter what Gates' answer in any of those three scenarios, it would have put Senate Republicans in an exceptionally difficult position of having to vote against a Trump nominee or accepting, in this case, a Trump nominee that they were not eager to confirm.

00:12:08 Speaker_04
Well, at the very least, they were gonna have to litigate whether the allegations that Gates had sex with women for money were true or not. Right.

00:12:17 Speaker_05
And therefore would have forced Senate Republicans to choose whom to trust, Gates or these women. Correct. It does feel notable that Trump chose not to force this vote, and not to force this showdown with Senate Republicans.

00:12:35 Speaker_05
He obviously made a choice here, and he said to Matt Gaetz, or at least someone around him said it with his approval, that's it, I'm sorry, you're done.

00:12:42 Speaker_04
I mean, you don't see it every day, but every once in a while, you see in Trump's world where the line is. Trump puts up with behavior amongst his allies and people around him, unlike any other politician we've ever seen.

00:12:58 Speaker_04
He allows people in that have counterintelligence problems, that have been accused of a litany of different things. Who are under investigation. You name it. Literally, like a buffet of different things. He lets all these folks in the House.

00:13:11 Speaker_04
But every once in a while, you get to see that there are some things that they will not tolerate. So, when someone's nomination is pulled, where someone is fired or they resign, you get to see where the line is. And today, we see where it is.

00:13:28 Speaker_05
Well, there's a complexity to this line. And clearly, Gates' situation is unique. The number of women he has alleged to have paid for sex the fact that one is a minor, the fact that he was picked to run the Justice Department, that all makes it unique.

00:13:46 Speaker_05
But we should point out that if the line for a Trump pick is serious accusations of sexual misconduct, we now have another Trump pick, Pete Hegseth, for Secretary of Defense, who is facing his own set of allegations of sexual misconduct.

00:14:03 Speaker_04
Correct. Because as the Gates story was coming into its final hours, A police report about Hegseth comes out that details accusations of rape against him. The woman says that he assaulted her in a California hotel room. He denies that that happened.

00:14:27 Speaker_04
But he says it was consensual. But what we do know is that he later reached a financial settlement with her that essentially silenced her from speaking out against him.

00:14:41 Speaker_05
And as for this question of whether this line applies to Hegseth, we are seeing that Hegseth is up on Capitol Hill with J.D. Vance, the same way that Gates was with J.D. Vance a couple of days ago.

00:14:53 Speaker_05
And it seems that Hegseth's reception so far from Senate Republicans is pretty positive. So we'll have to watch that pretty closely.

00:15:01 Speaker_05
Mike, when it comes to the AG pick, there's now a vacancy, and there's already talk of who Trump might replace Gates with. And one of the names that seems to be under consideration is a former personal lawyer to Trump. His name is Todd Blanche.

00:15:20 Speaker_05
He represented Trump in his criminal hush money trial in Manhattan. What do you make of that?

00:15:27 Speaker_04
So if Trump hadn't nominated Gates to be Attorney General, what we likely would have been concentrating on is the fact that he had announced that he was going to put Blanche in as his Deputy Attorney General.

00:15:41 Speaker_05
Number two.

00:15:42 Speaker_04
Correct. And why is that so significant? The president would have been putting his personal lawyer in at the top of the department. So the department is supposed to have this image of independence and following the laws and the evidence.

00:16:03 Speaker_04
But in this case, you would have had a lawyer who had defended the president in a criminal case in which he was convicted. And in terms of the norms that usually govern presidents, that is something that most presidents would not consider.

00:16:24 Speaker_04
Putting forward a personal lawyer who they have paid money to, and have an attorney-client relationship with.

00:16:31 Speaker_05
Right. And so far, we are not very focused on Todd Blanch. And to that point, I want to read you what our colleague Jonathan Swan said about the way that this has all played out. He said it in a roundtable that we have decided not to run.

00:16:45 Speaker_05
This is what he said. The controversy surrounding Gaetz has already served a purpose for Trump. Whether intended or not, it has made other Trump choices for cabinet picks appear more reasonable by comparison. In other words,

00:17:04 Speaker_05
What Jonathan is saying is that Gaetz and all the controversy around him means that getting the next pick for attorney general through is likely to be much easier, even if they represent somebody who might be just as outside the norm or as loyal to Trump as Gaetz.

00:17:23 Speaker_05
Do you buy into that?

00:17:24 Speaker_04
I do, because, objectively, Whoever comes after Gates will almost certainly not be as controversial as he is.

00:17:36 Speaker_04
And that will make that person more palatable to Senate Republicans who know that they're not going to have to figure out whether allegations from women their late teens and early 20s who said they had sex with Gates for money are telling the truth.

00:17:59 Speaker_05
Mike, thank you very much.

00:18:01 Speaker_04
Thanks for having me.

00:18:09 Speaker_05
On Thursday night, President-elect Trump announced that his new pick for attorney general would be Pam Bondi, a former Republican attorney general of Florida.

00:18:20 Speaker_05
Bondi, a member of Trump's legal team during his first impeachment, is viewed as highly loyal to Trump and, most importantly, as acceptable to the Senate Republicans, who will have to confirm her.

00:18:44 Speaker_06
We'll be right back.

00:18:53 Speaker_05
Here's what else you need to know today.

00:18:56 Speaker_05
On Thursday, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his former defense minister, Yoav Galant, accusing both men of carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity inside of Gaza.

00:19:16 Speaker_05
The warrants could subject both men to arrest in dozens of countries, and deals an extraordinary blow to Israel's standing across the globe. At the same time, the court issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas's military chief, Mohammed Daif.

00:19:35 Speaker_05
But the court acknowledged it was unsure whether Daif is dead or alive. In Washington, the White House forcefully rejected the legitimacy of the court's arrest warrants for the Israeli leaders, and said it has no plans to honor them.

00:19:58 Speaker_05
Remember, you can catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. Lulu talks with Rosé, a member of the group Blackpink, about her new solo album and the intense training process required to become a K-pop star.

00:20:15 Speaker_02
I felt like we were trained to always present ourselves in the most perfect, perfect way and making sure that I'm a perfect girl for everyone.

00:20:29 Speaker_05
Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Brendan Klinkenberg, contains original music by Pat McCusker and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

00:20:44 Speaker_05
Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.