Congress

How Matt Gaetz poisoned the House Ethics Committee

Published

2 years 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

Capitol agenda: How Warren could link arms with Trump’s GOP

Published

3 hours ago

October 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Elizabeth Warren may get her clearest shot yet to take on corporate America next year — thanks to the once unthinkable help of Republicans.

The Massachusetts Democrat is poised to chair Senate Banking if the party takes back the chamber. And while the progressive has long been a boogeyman to corporate America, lobbyists worry she’ll have powerful backup thanks to the surge of populist Republicans eager to take big swings at Wall Street and Big Tech.

One longtime financial industry lobbyist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said Warren “has a streak that is not just wanting to be a progressive gadfly, but to actually reach across the aisle to push for policy ideas.” There is “absolutely” reason for concern, the person said.

Atop the panel, Warren would also have a strong position to shape the 2028 presidential debates on both sides.

“There’s very little doubt that the agenda of the Senate Banking Committee is going to overlap substantially with the core issues that the candidates in the 2028 election cycle are going to be grappling with,” said Dennis Kelleher, the outgoing leader of the progressive group Better Markets.

As Banking chair, Warren is expected to try to recruit Republicans in a crackdown on artificial intelligence — specifically restrictions on chip giant Nvidia’s exports to China, which already has some GOP support — and a follow-up of this year’s bipartisan housing law that sought to rein in private equity’s role in the market, according to people close to the senator.

Some of President Donald Trump’s own populist ideas, like credit card interest rate caps and limits on stock buybacks for defense contractors, would provide fertile ground for Warren.

But Trump would also likely be Warren’s biggest obstacle, as he’s been resistant to embrace policy overlaps with her. He’s also been resistant to any AI restrictions.

Warren’s approach also threatens to expose rifts between GOP populists who have been ascendent under Trump and more mainstream conservatives.

Asked about the possibility of a Chair Warren, Sen. Mike Rounds, a more moderate South Dakota Republican, said he doesn’t “think anything would get done except lots of investigations and lots of accusations.”

What else we’re watching:

— LAWMAKERS CLAMOR FOR GAO v. TRUMP — Lawmakers are desperate for a government watchdog to step up and help them in their fight against the Trump administration over control of federal cash. The independent Government Accountability Office concluded earlier this week that the White House illegally withheld more than $1 billion for education and health care research programs — the latest in more than a half-dozen such findings GAO has published since the start of Trump’s second term. But the agency has yet to use its unique power to take the president to court to challenge those “impoundments,” and lawmakers who are tired of the administration running roughshod over their funding prerogatives want GAO to act.

— MURPHY’S DEFENSE FUNDING ULTIMATUM — Democrats should not approve Pentagon funding or the annual defense policy bill if they control Congress next year unless those bills would hasten the end of the Iran war, Sen. Chris Murphy told reporters Thursday. “We should make the end of the war a priority,” said the Foreign Relations Democrat who was returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Murphy also accused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and officials of attempting a “cover-up” of the war’s damage and obscuring its true cost after he was denied entry on a base in Qatar. Given the damage to bases in the region, Murphy also told reporters that the U.S. should “reconsider its footprint” in the Middle East.

Jasper Goodman, Jennifer Scholtes and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.

Congress

Even some Republicans want this watchdog agency to sue Trump

Published

3 hours ago

October 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Members of Congress are desperate for backup in their battle with the Trump administration over control of federal cash. The oversight agency that would lean into that fight is sitting on its hands.

The independent Government Accountability Office concluded earlier this week that the White House illegally withheld more than $1 billion for education and health care research programs — the latest in more than a half-dozen such findings GAO has published since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But the agency has yet to use its unique power to take the president to court to challenge those “impoundments,” and lawmakers who are tired of the administration running roughshod over their funding prerogatives want GAO to act.

There’s one problem: GAO is currently run by an interim director, acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, because the Senate has yet to confirm a long-term replacement following her predecessor’s retirement last year. And lawmakers fear she’s reluctant to exercise her temporary authority to take such dramatic legal action.

“They are empowered to sue,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters last week. “I think the biggest problem is that we have an acting director of the GAO, who understandably is wary of suing the administration without direct congressional approval.”

The recent rulings came on the heels of Trump’s unilateral cancellation of $810 million in other congressionally approved spending the previous week — which GAO quickly deemed illegal — as well as his decision to allow hundreds of millions more to expire as the fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

The search for a permanent GAO leader, meanwhile, appears to be at a standstill. A designated group of 10 senior lawmakers is supposed to be searching for replacement candidates to recommend for Trump’s nomination, but the members have yet to meet — nine months since former Comptroller General Gene Dodaro departed at the end of his 15-year term.

“We would like a GAO director who’s a man or a woman of integrity and going to do the job that needs to be done. That’s our focus,” said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, who is part of the selection group as the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

He said it was accurate that the group has made no progress toward recommending nominees.

The Washington Sun reported Thursday that the administration has floated the idea of Trump nominating Eric Ueland, a top official at the White House budget office and former longtime Senate aide, to head GAO. Blue Light News has not independently confirmed the potential nomination.

If Ueland is nominated, however, there is no guarantee he would have the votes for confirmation in a narrowly divided Senate, given the perception of his loyalty to the president and doubt he would challenge Trump’s funding moves.

In the meantime, lawmakers in both parties are urging the acting director to sue, while a GAO spokesperson maintains that the agency “has not made a decision to file any lawsuits at this time” and that the acting comptroller general “legally exercises all the functions and duties” of the role.

The fact that GAO is operating without a Senate-confirmed leader “is definitely stifling their ability to hold the administration accountable,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview, adding that he believed Dodaro was “clearly building toward making a case” prior to his retirement.

Dodaro said in an interview during his final days at GAO that he considered a lawsuit against the Trump administration “a last resort.” He explained that “in every case we’ve identified so far, people were already suing” and that “Congress has the ability to correct these things and to deal with the distribution of funds.”

What the former inspector general did not expect, however, is the Supreme Court’s suggestion last fall that GAO is the only entity with standing to sue the Trump administration for violating the decades-old Impoundment Control Act, which was designed to ensure presidents spend all the money Congress approves.

Dodaro said he was “surprised” by that suggestion, given his belief that “the law is very clear that GAO’s ability to sue doesn’t preclude anybody else from suing.”

A year later, the president has continued to flout Congress’ authority to dictate how federal dollars get spent. Top administration officials and some Republicans in Congress have publicly belittled GAO as a partisan and noncredible oversight agency since Trump’s return to office.

And after the federal watchdog concluded last week that Trump’s recent funding cancellation is unconstitutional, White House budget director Russ Vought claimed on social media that GAO makes its “legal assessments based on whether Democrats are in the White House.”

Potentially bolstering GAO’s arguments in a lawsuit, lawmakers added provisions to the government funding bills Trump signed into law this year designed to protect their own power of the purse, though Republicans bucked Democratic demands to enact the most aggressive constraints — including to block Trump’s ability to cancel federal dollars at the end of the fiscal year.

Some Republicans are now embracing more stringent methods to stifle Trump’s funding moves, however, after he slashed hundreds of millions dollars through the “pocket rescissions” tactic last month.

“I’m very disappointed in their action here, and it will have to be rectified,” Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, said about Trump’s latest funding cancellation in an interview.

But he also said he doesn’t know if GAO or another entity should sue: “I’m not sure who should do it. All I know is I want a different result than what we have right now.”

Congress

This watchdog can bark. Congress wants it to bite.

Published

6 hours ago

October 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Members of Congress are desperate for backup in their battle with the Trump administration over control of federal cash. The oversight agency that would lean into that fight is sitting on its hands.

He said it was accurate that the group has made no progress toward recommending nominees.

Dodaro said he was “surprised” by that suggestion, given his belief that “the law is very clear that GAO’s ability to sue doesn’t preclude anybody else from suing.”

“I’m very disappointed in their action here, and it will have to be rectified,” Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, said about Trump’s latest funding cancellation in an interview.

But he also said he doesn’t know if GAO or another entity should sue: “I’m not sure who should do it. All I know is I want a different result than what we have right now.”