{"id":19341,"date":"2026-02-25T15:46:39","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T15:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/mike-johnson-gonzales-allegations-will-play-out-in-primary-next-week\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T15:46:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T15:46:39","slug":"mike-johnson-gonzales-allegations-will-play-out-in-primary-next-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/mike-johnson-gonzales-allegations-will-play-out-in-primary-next-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Mike Johnson: Gonzales allegations will \u2018play out\u2019 in primary next week"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday he believes Rep. Tony Gonzales\u2019 primary election, now six days away, will be a referendum on the serious sexual harassment allegations plaguing the Texas Republican.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019ve said to him publicly and privately, he&#8217;s got to address that directly and head on with his constituents,\u201d Johnson told reporters. \u201cThere&#8217;s a primary there in less than a week, these things will play out.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gonzales has been accused of having an affair with a staffer and pressuring her for sexually explicit photos. That staffer later died by suicide.<\/p>\n<p>While Johnson and fellow House GOP leaders have not pulled their endorsement of Gonzales, several rank-and-file Republicans have called for their colleague\u2019s resignation and many are unsure Gonzales can prevail against his challenger at this point.<\/p>\n<p>Gonzales told reporters Tuesday he was \u201cnot resigning\u201d from Congress.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday morning, Johnson again called the allegations against Gonzales \u201calarming and detestable\u201d and deflected when asked by reporters why he had not yet come down harder on the lawmaker.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow do you know I haven\u2019t?\u201d Johnson said.<\/p>\n<p>He added, \u201cI don&#8217;t usually go into detail on private conversations I&#8217;ve had with members, but I&#8217;ll tell you that what I&#8217;ve said publicly is these are very serious allegations. He&#8217;s denied much of it. We have to allow the due process here to play out, as always.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday he believes Rep. Tony Gonzales\u2019 primary election, now six days away, will be a referendum on the serious sexual harassment allegations plaguing the Texas Republican. \u201cI\u2019ve said to him publicly and privately, he&#8217;s got to address that directly and head on with his constituents,\u201d Johnson told reporters. \u201cThere&#8217;s a primary [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19341\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}