By Bo Erickson, Andrew Goudsward and David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Hardline Republican Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general after the former lawmaker faced opposition from Senate Republicans over his past conduct.
Gaetz, who resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives last week, was the subject of an Ethics Committee probe into allegations of having sex with an underage 17-year-old girl. He has denied wrongdoing.
The nomination was an early test of Trump’s power over Congress, where his Republican Party will hold majorities in both chambers next year. Gaetz was disliked by many fellow Republicans for having orchestrated the ouster last year of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, throwing the House into chaos for weeks.
Republicans in the Senate had bristled at the idea of being asked to vote on Gaetz without seeing the findings of the House Ethics Committee’s investigation into the allegations of sexual misconduct.
Gaetz, in a post on X, said he wanted to avoid becoming a distraction to the incoming Trump administration.
“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General,” Gaetz wrote. “Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”
Gaetz, who was nominated last week, never worked at the Justice Department nor served as a prosecutor at any level of government. He was investigated by the FBI for nearly three years over potential sex trafficking violations, a probe that ended last year without charges being brought.
Trump was also the subject of multiple Justice Department investigations, and faced two federal indictments related to his conduct during and after his 2017-2021 term in office. He has denied all wrongdoing, described the prosecutions as politically motivated and vowed to use the department to go after political enemies when he returns to power on Jan. 20.
Gaetz earned a reputation as a firebrand and loyal Trump ally during his time in the House and his nomination was viewed as an indication Trump would follow through on his vows to use the Justice Department to exact retribution against his foes.
“He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Since Trump’s pick, a handful of Republican senators had either directly questioned the pick or said they would want to see the findings of the ethics report on Gaetz, raising questions of whether he could win sufficient votes for confirmation in a chamber where Republicans are expected to hold a 53-47 majority.
“There was perhaps some information out there that the president was not aware of when he made the original recommendation,” said Republican Senator Mike Rounds. He described Gaetz’s withdrawal as the Senate fulfilling its duty to advise presidents on nominations.
NEXT STEPS UNCLEAR
Trump’s choice of Gaetz stunned even his own supporters and it was unclear on Thursday who the president-elect might consider as an alternate candidate.
Trump has already tapped Todd Blanche, one of his criminal defense lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, to serve as the No. 2 Justice Department official, and former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Jay Clayton to lead the high-profile U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer who runs a legal advocacy group called the Article III Project, said on social media that he would like to see Trump consider as attorney general candidates Republican Senator Mike Lee, Mark Paoletta, who is working on his Justice Department transition planning, or Chris Landau, who served during Trump’s first term as U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
A spokesperson said Trump would “announce his new decision when it is made.”
Gaetz is the first Cabinet-level nominee tapped to serve in Trump’s upcoming administration to withdraw, though several have faced scrutiny over past behavior.
When he resigned from Congress last week he said his decision applied to his current term as well as to the new one that would begin on Jan. 3. But independent experts and a congressional source indicated that he still had the option of changing his mind on the upcoming term and returning to office then.
Another Trump nominee, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, who was tapped as Defense Secretary, has also been engulfed in controversy for alleged sexual misconduct.
As Gaetz’s path to confirmation looked imperiled, Trump had been calling senators and telling them how committed he was to Gaetz, according to a source close to the president-elect. Billionaire Elon Musk, a Trump ally, had been using his social media platform X to go to bat for Gaetz, attacking the former congressman’s critics and praising his selection. Musk had posted about Gaetz 34 times since Trump announced his nomination on Nov. 13, depicting Gaetz as an outsider who would be willing to disrupt the system.
Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis said Gaetz’s decision to drop out would give Trump the opportunity to nominate an attorney general “with fewer headwinds in the Senate.”
The House Ethics Committee deadlocked five to five on party lines on Wednesday on whether to release the findings of its probe into Gaetz. A Florida attorney said this week that two women testified to the panel that they were paid for sex with Gaetz and one witnessed Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old girl in 2017.
“From everything that built up to this point, it doesn’t surprise me,” Republican Senator Mike Braun said of Gaetz’s decision.
Other Republicans expressed disappointment.
“I had a very important relationship with Matt,” said Senator Rick Scott, who like Gaetz is from Florida. Scott said he hopes Trump picks “whoever is going to be a fighter for getting the Department of Justice to stop being a partisan entity.”
(Reporting by Bo Erickson in Washington and Andrew Goudsward in New Jersey; Additional reporting by David Morgan, Richard Cowan, Sarah N. Lynch, Helen Coster, Moira Warburton, Nathan Layne, Alexandra Ulmer, Doina Chiacu and Ismail Shakil; Editing by Scott Malone and Daniel Wallis)
