Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) published a lengthy opinion editorial in another attempt to clear his name amid sexual misconduct allegations and a Justice Department investigation into sex trafficking allegations made against the representative.
“Washington scandal cycles are predictable, and sex is especially potent in politics,” Gaetz said in his piece published to the Washington Examiner. “Let me first remind everyone that I am a representative in Congress, not a monk, and certainly not a criminal.”
“Just as they once falsely attacked President Donald Trump as a Russian asset, Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, and even John McCain as having fathered a child out of wedlock, they now attack me,” he said. “Of course, none of what they say ever amounts to anything, yet it is endlessly repeated by leftist television anchors such as Chris Cuomo, who uses his platform to cover for his brother’s appalling subjection of nursing home patients to death by the coronavirus. They think themselves such wonderful arbiters of moral purpose.”
Similar to his last Tuesday interview with Fox Host Tucker Carlson, Gaetz drew a comparison with several past scandals to soften his own. “Yes, just like the mafia, the D.C. swamp protects its ‘made men.’ Since I’m taking my turn under the gun, let me address the allegations against me directly,” Gaetz said in his op-ed.
“First, I have never, ever paid for sex. And second, I, as an adult man, have not slept with a 17-year-old. This is how D.C. works. The guilty and wrong point fingers at the innocent and right. Remember President Joe Biden’s Ukraine scandal,” he wrote. “My lifestyle of yesteryear may be different from how I live now, but it was not and is not illegal.”
