On Tuesday, before the New York Times reported that Rep. Matt Gaetz was being investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old—and potentially violating sex trafficking laws by paying for her travel with him—the Florida congressman had already made headlines, albeit for a comparatively benign scoop: Axios reported that Gaetz was thinking about leaving Congress early for a TV gig at Newsmax. A day later, Gaetz told the Daily Beast that Newsmax wasn’t the only right-wing outlet he was talking to about post-congressional plans. “There is not a single conservative television station I haven’t had a passing conversation with about life after Congress,” Gaetz said, noting he had “neither received nor solicited offers from any of them,” though “executives, producers, or hosts” at “OAN, Fox, Fox Business, [and] Real America’s Voice” were among the interested lot.
Sadly, Rupert Murdoch’s network has since emerged to crush Gaetz’s dreams, denying any such conversations, let alone interest in bringing him on board. “No one with any level of authority has had conversations with Matt Gaetz for any of our platforms and we have no interest in hiring him,” Fox News said in a statement to Mediate. OAN founder and CEO Robert Herring appeared to echo that stance, telling the Daily Beast that while “somebody did call me and say that Congressman Gaetz might be looking for a job, possibly at Newsmax,” Herring is “not really hiring anybody for talk shows” at the moment. “I think he is a great congressman, and I told [that ‘somebody’] to tell him to stay there,” he said. “That’s what I want Congressman Gaetz to do.”
All told a disappointing verdict for Gaetz, who has found himself enmeshed in a scandal that gets more mind-boggling by the day—in part thanks to new details he’s revealed himself. After the Times story broke, the congressman vehemently denied the story to Tucker Carlson on Tuesday night in what the Fox News star later called “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted.” Gaetz told Carlson that his actions were aboveboard and alleged that he was actually the victim of an extortion plot involving an ex-DOJ official trying to blackmail him for $25 million, a smear campaign, and his father wearing a wire for the FBI.
It seems there’s some truth to that story, though the Washington Post reports it had little to do with the Justice Department’s probe besides that the sex-crimes investigation served as leverage. According to the Post, two men who came to know of the DOJ probe allegedly approached Gaetz’s father, former state Senate leader Don Gaetz, asking him to bankroll their plans to locate an American hostage in Iran believed to be dead. These men reportedly said that, if their plan succeeded, they could make Don Gaetz’s son’s “future legal and political problems go away” by giving the congressman credit for the hostage’s release.
Now, as the DOJ continues to look into the younger Gaetz, the FBI is investigating whether the pitch to his father about the American hostage could constitute attempted extortion. The Post reports that producing criminal charges for such an act could be complicated by the fact that the two men “did not explicitly threaten to expose the congressman unless they were paid” when they first reached out to his father. Altogether an interesting position for the congressman—but one that some of his colleagues reportedly anticipated, at least in rough outlines. A former Republican staffer told the Daily Beast on Wednesday that “their office had an informal rule to not allow their member to appear next to Gaetz during TV hits, fearful of the inevitable scandal that would come out one day.”
— Wyoming Tells Donald Trump Jr. to Sit Down and STFU
— A Wave of Displaced New Yorkers Is Upending the Hamptons Social Order
— How a Group of Rich Memphians Acted on Trump’s Big Lie During Capitol Attack
— Prosecutors Are Lining Up Witnesses in Trump Investigations
— Republicans Brave Plan to Stop Mass Shootings: Do Nothing
— Next-Level Harassment of Female Journalists Puts News Outlets to the Test
— Six Photographers Share Images From Their COVID Year
— From the Archive: American Nightmare, the Ballad of Richard Jewell
— Serena Williams, Michael B. Jordan, Gal Gadot, and more are coming to your favorite screen April 13–15. Get your tickets to Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour, Live! here.