What we always need before judging where the truth lies is evidence.
Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration to be attorney general happened under a cloud of rumor. Gaetz was investigated by the Justice Department for sex trafficking but was not charged. He was investigated by the House Ethics Committee for many of the same alleged activities, such as reportedly having sex with a 17-year-old and using Venmo to pay her and another young woman for sex (if true, that means not everyone learned the lesson of Jerry Springer being run out of electoral politics in the early 1980s for paying a prostitute with a check). He dropped out as CNN was preparing another report on his sexual adventures with underage girls sourced from a civil lawsuit in Florida.
Even aside from the many reasons — apparent from his public career — why he was a poor choice to be attorney general, it’s good that Gaetz dropped out. If these various accounts are true, he would be in the best position of anyone to know this. Neither due process of law nor transparency nor any other institutional or procedural value is required in order for Matt Gaetz to conclude that Matt Gaetz was guilty of things that would destroy his reputation if fully aired in public.
But had Gaetz remained under consideration, it would have been essential for the Senate to give a fair hearing to both his accusers and his defense before deciding whether to confirm him. (This will also be true of Pete Hegseth and any other nominee accused of serious sexual offenses.) It’s not enough to judge nominees on the basis of rumors. True, senators voted down John Tower in 1989 without fully exploring in public the evidence of his behavior, but Tower had been one of their colleagues; many of the people voting on his nomination knew Tower well enough to have witnessed things themselves.
The Senate didn’t necessarily need to get the House Ethics Committee report, helpful as that might be in guiding the judgments of senators; they need not have accepted its conclusions. Nor should the Senate necessarily have come to the same conclusions as the Justice Department did in its investigation, given that those conclusions were supposed to answer different questions, such as whether Gaetz broke federal law, whether the investigation of the congressman was compromised by an FBI agent’s trying to blackmail his father, whether the evidence could meet the standard for a criminal conviction, and how to exercise prosecutorial discretion. What the Senate would have needed was the underlying evidence, and the opportunity to assess that evidence for itself — including giving Gaetz a chance to make a case in his own defense.
As I emphasized during the Brett Kavanaugh controversy, and again when Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, our fundamental obligation is to take charges seriously, demand evidence before believing them, and make a determination of the credibility of the charges after giving a fair opportunity to defend them. Gaetz is entitled to due process, and so are his accusers. In the context of a political process such as Senate confirmation, due process will look different there than in an FBI investigation, a criminal trial, a civil deposition, or even some other political context such as an election campaign or a House Ethics Committee hearing. But it still comes down to the same thing: What matters is the evidence itself and whether it is believable after undergoing serious scrutiny. That was the Senate’s task to decide with Gaetz, and it will be the Senate’s task to decide with regard to other nominees as well, both now and in the future. Rumors aren’t evidence, and neither can they be dismissed — what we always need before judging where the truth lies is evidence.