Congress

How Matt Gaetz poisoned the House Ethics Committee

Published

1 year ago

March 18, 2025

Scandal-ridden former Rep. Matt Gaetz is gone from Congress, but the wounds he inflicted on the House Ethics Committee that investigated him remain fresh.

After the longest delay in recent history, the panel finally recruited enough members to perform its grim mandate of governing fellow lawmakers’ conduct in the 119th Congress. And they’ll have their work cut out for them: The committee is still regrouping from its crisis late last year over whether to break with recent precedent and release the results of an investigation into their former Florida GOP colleague, who was being considered for attorney general.

The Ethics Committee rarely releases findings of investigations into lawmakers who resign before those investigations can conclude. Gaetz tested that practice, with lawmakers on both sides arguing the information was critical for senators to review in advance of his confirmation hearings.

Gaetz ended up withdrawing from consideration, but it doesn’t stop disagreements over how to proceed within the notoriously private committee from spilling out into the open, with finger pointing over the source of leaks potentially coming from inside the panel’s ranks. Democrats accused some Republicans of trying to shield Gaetz from scrutiny over allegations of illicit drug use and paying a minor for sex.

The Ethics Committee is never a coveted assignment, which means party leaders will inevitably have a difficult time finding members to reconstitute the panel, said one GOP lawmaker granted anonymity to speak candidly.

“Nobody ever wants to sit on the committee,” the lawmaker said in an interview.

But the Gaetz episode has contributed to conditions from which the Ethics Committee could struggle to fully recover, former members said in interviews. It could plunge the panel into further dysfunction as the committee prepares in the coming weeks to ramp up after a monthslong delay and a pileup of potential cases.

“It is a monster cloud,” former Rep. Mike Conaway, who served as Ethics Committee chair from 2013-2015, said of the allegations of leaks in the previous Congress that could plague the panel’s current membership.

House Republican leaders tapped GOP Rep. Michael Guest of Missouri to return as committee chair, joining repeat Reps. John Rutherford (R-Fla.), Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) and Glenn Ivey (D-Md.).

New Republican members assigned to the Ethics Committee will be Reps. Nathaniel Moran of Texas and Ashley Hinson of Iowa. Democratic leadership tapped Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas to join the committee, and selected Rep. Mark DeSaulnier of California as the new ranking member.

Among their first items of business might be resuming an investigation held over from the previous Congress into Rep. Cory Mills, a Florida Republican who drew attention last month over allegations of assault by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.

Paramount to the committee’s integrity on all matters is its strict code of confidentiality: Members agree never to speak in any capacity about its pending business, on or off the record. After the events surrounding Gaetz, however, it’s not clear that confidentiality is still guaranteed.

A flurry of news reports late last year revealed how members of the Ethics Committee were fighting over how to handle the Gaetz situation — insider information that spilled out into the public domain. Finger-pointing abounded as to who was leaking the private details, including the fact that there was a split secret vote on whether to release the Gaetz report.

These events also obliterated the longstanding presumption of nonpartisanship inside the committee, which is the only panel evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Guest called the report’s release a “dangerous departure with potentially catastrophic consequences.” Speaker Mike Johnson had said he did not want the report to be public.

In a further divide, as the Ethics Committee deliberated on next steps, Democrats were making procedural moves to force a vote on the House floor to release the report on Gaetz. Rep. Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat leading that effort, recently called the Ethics Committee “a speed bump on the road to hell [Johnson] is driving himself on.”

“Everything’s become so partisan, and if [the committee] hasn’t become actually partisan, there’s suspicions of partisanship regardless of what people do or say,” said former Rep. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who served on the Ethics Committee from 2011-2013, in an interview. “It undermines any decision the committee makes.”

Yarmuth added, “If you attack the credibility of the Ethics Committee, then nobody fears the Ethics Committee … I think you’d want to be afraid of running afoul of the Ethics Committee.”

Former Rep. Gregg Harper, a Mississippi Republican who served on the panel alongside Yarmuth, in the private sector now represents lawmakers who have cases pending before the House Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional Ethics, a nonpartisan entity tasked with vetting outside complaints against lawmakers before sending them to the formal committee.

He said the decision to release the report on Gaetz after he had already left Congress undermined one of the key motivators of the Ethics Committee: Pushing bad acting lawmakers out of office. After all, Gaetz’s decision to resign from the House following his nomination to be attorney general by then-President-elect Donald Trump was widely seen as an effort to avoid the release of a damning report into his alleged misconduct that could foil his chances for confirmation.

“It’s always been understood, ‘hey, if you’re in a mess, you leave — get out of there, don’t come back,’” Harper said in an interview. “The reality is sometimes a member needs to leave … one motivation to leave is, ‘Okay, I can put this behind me, and there won’t be anything else that I’ll to deal with, maybe, in the press.’”

Harper and Yarmuth both recalled the discomfort they experienced when leadership drafted them into serving on the Ethics Committee. Harper said his colleagues asked if then-Speaker John Boehner was “mad at you about something?” Yarmuth said he was approached on the House floor by Rep. Maxine Waters, during the committee’s investigation into her dealings with a bank in which her husband had a financial interest.

“How can you do this?” Yarmuth said Waters would repeatedly plead with him on the floor.

In a sign that leaders of the reconstituted Ethics Committee are for the time being adhering to the rules, a spokesperson for DeSauliner referred comment for this story to the panel’s staff director — whose job it is to interface with the media — citing confidentiality policies. The staff director, in turn, declined to comment. A spokesperson for Guest also referred press inquiries to the staff director.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who was the chair of the Ethics Committee from 2009-2011 — during which time she oversaw the investigation that culminated in a rare censure of a fellow member of her own party, the late-Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York, for tax violations — said she wasn’t sure where the panel would go from here.

“It’s very difficult,” she conceded, when asked about the future of the panel in the wake of the Gaetz report. “But they operate with discretion, so we really don’t know the details.”

Congress

Trump not expected to act on Pulte after Johnson meeting

Published

1 hour ago

June 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A key U.S. spy law remains on track to expire at the end of the week after Speaker Mike Johnson met with President Donald Trump Tuesday about the future of a key section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Trump indicated in the private White House that he’s not inclined to appease Democrats and pave the way for a FISA extension by nominating a permanent director of national intelligence to succeed Bill Pulte, the acting director he installed last week, according to three people briefed on the conversation who were granted anonymity to describe it.

Most Democrats are refusing to move forward with any FISA extension so long as Pulte, a close political ally of the president with no national security experience, remains in the intelligence post. Some Republicans have been hoping a new Trump nomination could provide an off-ramp ahead of the quickly approaching FISA deadline.

But the people briefed on the meeting were left with the impression it didn’t go very well as Trump continues to push back on any suggestion that he needs to placate Democrats to pave the way for a FISA extension.

Johnson told reporters Tuesday the meeting went well but declined to discuss specifics. He added that “Democrats have taken a hostage” and that the Senate would need to quickly figure out a path forward.

Congress

Longtime Epstein assistant says she set up phone calls between Epstein and Trump

Published

1 hour ago

June 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime assistant Lesley Groff said in a closed-door interview Tuesday that she arranged phone calls between the late, disgraced financier and President Donald Trump, two Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee told reporters.

“I believe she referred to a time before, before Mr. Trump was president, that she did arrange for multiple phone calls between the two,” Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) said of Groff, who worked for Epstein for around 18 years beginning in 2001.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) also said that Groff told the panel that “she arranged calls for them to connect,” referring to the president and Epstein, but that those calls were not frequent.

Groff is on Capitol Hill to speak to the Oversight committee as part of its ongoing Epstein investigation. Trump has insisted he cut off ties with Epstein years before his death and has not been charged with any misconduct, but Democrats have repeatedly questioned whether the administration has worked to cover up evidence of a continued relationship.

“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement. “And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”

Groff was never charged with any wrongdoing, but in a class-action lawsuit against the co-executors of Epstein’s estate, she is cited as “Epstein’s secretary who made travel arrangements for the girls, tended to their living needs, and scheduled massage sessions.” She also was named as an unindicted co-conspirator as part of Epstein’s 2008 non-prosecution agreement.

A key player in Epstein’s orbit throughout his life, Groff’s name is featured prominently in the Epstein files rolled out by the Justice Department late last year, showing her on the front lines of arranging meetings on her former boss’s behalf.

But behind closed doors Tuesday, lawmakers said Tuesday that Groff sought to distance herself from Epstein’s improprieties, telling the Oversight committee she did not see Epstein engage in misconduct.

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) said in an interview that he did not believe it was “remotely plausible” for Groff to be oblivious to Epstein’s deeds.

“He was a registered sex offender, and she arranged young women for massages with a registered sex offender, and I just question whether, whether she can rightfully and truthfully maintain that she saw nothing improper,” said Lynch.

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) said in an interview Monday night he was eager to “get [Groff] on the record, so that when we find out later she was lying, we can arrest her.”

An attorney for Groff did not return a request for comment.

Congress

Ted Lieu slams bipartisan AI proposal

Published

3 hours ago

June 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Democratic Caucus Vice Chair Ted Lieu hammered a bipartisan AI framework Tuesday, saying the proposal his colleagues introduced last week “cannot meet the enormity of the moment.”

Lieu, who is also one of three members on an AI commission convened by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, said at his weekly news conference that the regulatory blueprint championed by his fellow Californian, Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte — and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) — “was not something that would work, because there’s a lot of issues it does not cover.”

Lieu said he welcomes other House Democrats to engage on the topic, but suggested that Trahan and Obernolte had failed to win over adequate support to make their framework politically viable. Their 269-page draft bill would, among other things, override some state AI laws, drawing attacks from many House Democrats and safety advocates.

“In Congress you have to build a consensus, you actually have to get groups and members of Congress and organizations to support what you’re trying to do,” Lieu added. “The particular framework that was released last week got intense pushback from the civil rights community, the labor community, AI safety folks — and so you know, if we’re to get something done, we need to build consensus and build a coalition, and that’s the first step that needs that.”

His unsparing comments are a blow not only to efforts to find common ground on a thorny policy matter, but also expose deeper rifts among Democrats as the party has struggled to coalesce around a unified vision for how to regulate the emerging technology.

Trahan has said she jumped into AI negotiations with Republicans because she is worried about mass economic and humanitarian disruption from Anthropic’s Mythos model, necessitating quick legislative action and cross-party dealmaking. Lieu said he is well aware of the urgency to produce a framework to regulate AI, insisting his commission would roll out its own proposal by the end of the year.

“Shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that was titled, essentially, ‘AI freaks me out,’” Lieu said. “I am well aware of the urgency, many people are well aware of the urgency, so it’s not lost on the people working on this issue that we need to urgently get something done.”