President-elect Donald Trump will not “go down fighting” for former Congressman Matt Gaetz, his controversial pick for U.S. attorney general, according to former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin.
Gaetz, formerly the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation and federal criminal probe into allegations including sexual misconduct and illegal drug use, on November 13 was nominated by Trump to become the nation’s legal authority. The president-elect at the time praised Gaetz as a “deeply gifted and tenacious attorney” who would “root out systemic corruption” as the top law enforcement official at the Department of Justice (DOJ).
While the House ethics report on Gaetz was at least temporarily blocked by his resignation from Congress shortly last week, a DOJ document obtained by The New York Times added fuel to the fire on Wednesday by revealing that Gaetz allegedly paid thousands of dollars to a number of women via Venmo. The DOJ investigation, which ended without charges last year, was probing an allegation that Gaetz sex trafficked a minor, which Gaetz has strongly denied.
Griffin, who has been an outspoken Trump critic since leaving his first administration during its final months, suggested during a CNN appearance on Wednesday that Trump’s current advisers should urge him to drop the Gaetz nomination due to the “incredibly salacious” allegations against the former Republican congressman from Florida.
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“If any people advising the former president have to make a calculation of, ‘Is it better if this goes to an open committee hearing and this sort of thing is dug out in the open with more and greater detail?’—It’s incredible salacious, it’s incredibly damning,” Griffin said. “It’s not something that, if I were advising him, I would want him to be kind of tied in with.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to Trump’s office via email on Wednesday night.
Griffin said that Senator John Thune, set to become the Republican Senate majority leader in early January, could offer Trump a “more graceful off-ramp” to pull the nomination by indicating that Gaetz does not have the votes to be confirmed.
She then suggested that Trump may not be fully “dug in on” Gaetz, despite the president-elect reportedly making personal calls to convince GOP senators to back the nomination, before predicting that he would ultimately opt not to spend his “political capital” on the former congressman.
“When I worked for Trump, I knew when there was somebody he was dug in on,” Griffin said. “A guy or gal that he had to have, somebody that he was really going to go down fighting for. I’m not totally convinced that he’s there with Matt Gaetz. He’s making the calls, he’s doing the things he needs to.”
“But you’ll know if he’s giving his full-throated ‘you will be primaried if you’re not with him’ endorsement, and it doesn’t quite feel like it’s there yet,” she added. “This isn’t one of his buddies that he’s necessarily going to expend much of his own political capital for.”