Understandably, we’re not hearing a lot, which is to say, anything, from the former defenders of Matt Gaetz, who was Donald Trump’s pick to be Attorney General, you may remember.
Trump wanted a guy who the House Ethics Committee says sex-trafficked a 17-year-old high school junior, regularly paid other women to have sex with him, used congressional resources to fuel his drug habit, and only avoided prosecution by the Justice Department because the feds didn’t want to look like they were being political in going after the guy, to be the AG.
Trump hasn’t had anything to say about the damning report on his guy Matt Gaetz, who he had said, back when he nominated him for the AG post, was going to “root out the systemic corruption at DOJ, and return the Department to its true mission of fighting Crime, and upholding our Democracy and Constitution.”
Lofty words there from the Trumper.
If you’re wondering if Trump would have known anything about the person that Matt Gaetz really is, remember, Gaetz asked Trump for a pardon in the waning days of the first Trump administration, back in 2021.
So, yeah.
You know who else knew the truth about Matt Gaetz?
“He is a warrior against the weaponization of the Justice Department and the lawfare that’s been waged by the Biden administration. So, he knows exactly what has to happen to the Justice Department to fix it.”
This was Ben Cline, who was just re-elected to a fourth term representing the Sixth District of Virginia in Congress, despite there being a much better choice, in the form of Ken Mitchell, a retired military guy who has actually held meaningful jobs outside of government, unlike the guy who won.
Our Ben Cline fella was big on Gaetz, who our colleague, Gene Zitver, notes had donated $2,000 to Cline’s 2020 re-election campaign, almost certainly just to curry favor down the road, since Cline runs in one of the safer Republican districts in the country, and doesn’t need a ton of money to bankroll his campaigns.
That $2,000 bought the lofty quote from Cline when Gaetz was nominated to the AG post, and silence when the House Ethics Committee threw the hammer down.
Zitver had a pointed question for Cline in a Monday column on the Gaetz news:
“Congressman Cline: Please don’t try to tell us you had no inkling of Gaetz’s disgusting and illegal behavior when you accepted his gift and praised his nomination. We won’t believe you. Do you have the decency to be embarrassed?”
We won’t hold our breath waiting for an answer on that one.
This would probably be a good time to remind you that 82 percent of the 30 million White evangelicals who voted in the 2024 elections voted for Trump, despite his own issues with sex crimes.
The big one there: two juries sided with a woman, E. Jean Carroll, in defamation cases in 2023 and 2024 in which the central point was Trump’s claims that Carroll was making up a story about Trump sexually assaulting her in 1996.
The judge in the first case, Lewis A. Kaplan, dismissed a post-trial claim from Trump’s legal team that Carroll had defamed Trump by saying Trump had “raped” her, ruling that her words were “substantially true.”
The juries awarded $88.3 million to Carroll in the cases.
So, an adjudicated rapist got the White evangelicals’ votes, and their votes enabled the adjudicated rapist to nominate a suspected child sex trafficker to be in charge of the Department of Justice.
And this is the side that wants you to believe that they’re big on family stuff.
Question for White evangelicals: do you have the decency to be embarrassed?
It’s OK; we already know the answer.
Video: Ben Cline loves him some Matt Gaetz
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Chris Graham
