The House Ethics Committee’s report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz doesn’t just detail long-anticipated conclusions about his conduct. It also suggests a Gaetz butterfly effect, where the committee’s investigation ties into the downfall of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
On April 27, 2023 — less than a month before the Ethics Committee restarted its investigation into Gaetz — Gaetz told CNN that he would give McCarthy “an ‘A,’” as far as how he was doing as speaker.
“I don’t give it lightly. I think he’s done a good job,” Gaetz told CNN at the time.
But less than a month later, on May 23, the Ethics Committee told Gaetz it was reopening its investigation into his conduct. Gaetz’s public rhetoric about McCarthy quickly got more negative.
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In June 2023 — after the House passed a debt ceiling deal that Gaetz was highly critical of — Gaetz and a group of Republicans blocked action on the House floor, marking a stark escalation in the feud.
“We’re concerned that the fundamental commitments that allowed Kevin McCarthy to assume the speakership have been violated as a consequence of the debt limit deal, and the answer for us is to reassert House conservatives as the appropriate coalition partner for our leadership, instead of them making common cause with Democrats,” Gaetz told reporters at the time.
Publicly, Gaetz cited a number of reasons for his disruptive behavior within the Republican conference — objection to the use of a continuing resolution to fund the government, spending for Ukraine and the lack of trust that many in the conference purportedly had in McCarthy.
“We need to move on with new leadership that can be trustworthy,” Gaetz told CNN at the time. “Look, the one thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy.”
However, sources privately indicate that this was all because of the ethics investigation. While there was never a direct ask from Gaetz of McCarthy to drop the ethics investigation, the Florida Republican made it clear that’s what he wanted, multiple sources familiar with the dynamic told NOTUS.
One of the sources added that Gaetz got mutual acquaintances of both him and McCarthy to weigh in and suggest the speaker kill the investigation.
McCarthy — both publicly and privately — always had the same response: He had no control over what the Ethics Committee did or how it handled its investigation.
“He’s blaming me for an ethics complaint against him that happened in the last Congress. I have nothing to do with it. He wants me to try to wipe that away. I’m not going to do that. That’s illegal. And you know what? If someway I lose my job because I uphold the law [and the] continuity of government, so be it,” McCarthy told CNBC on Oct. 3, 2023.
The timeline of the investigation and the details outlined in the committee’s report suggest the push to oust McCarthy and Gaetz’s ethics headache may have been entangled.
Gaetz introduced the motion to vacate the speakership on Oct. 2, 2023 — the same day as his deadline to respond to the Ethics Committee’s request for information. The following day, tensions between the two culminated in the end of McCarthy’s tenure as speaker.
“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker,” McCarthy said at an event at Georgetown University in April 2024. “Because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old, an ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker. And that’s illegal and I’m not gonna get in the middle of it.”
In private correspondence, Gaetz indicated to a friend that his effort to undercut and ultimately remove McCarthy was payback for the ethics probe and that his animus toward McCarthy was over that investigation.
Gaetz and a spokesperson for McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment.
Members and staffers on the Hill also viewed the motion to vacate as a way for Gaetz to kill the investigation. But they don’t think that’s all Gaetz has done to try and stop the report from being released.
Last month, when Gaetz was informed that the committee was meeting to vote on whether or not to release the report, he resigned from Congress after accepting a surprise nomination to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general.
This threw the committee for a loop: Could it still release a report on someone who is no longer a member of Congress?
Precedent suggested the committee could proceed. But then Gaetz ended his nomination once it became evident he didn’t have the votes in the Senate.
This created a new set of questions for the committee. Now, Gaetz was no longer a member of Congress and wasn’t seeking any political office. So, could the committee then release a report on someone who is, for all intents and purposes, a private citizen?
Committee members, after a secret vote earlier in December, answered that question loudly and definitively on Monday.
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Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS. Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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