Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, has come up with an interesting way to defend President-elect Donald Trump's attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, who has been accused of sex trafficking and having a relationship with a 17-year-old girl. If GOP lawmakers are going to express reservations about Gaetz on those grounds, she said, then they should be ready to explain their alleged coverups of “sexual harassment and assault claims” using taxpayer money.
“For my Republican colleagues in the House and Senate, if we are going to release ethics reports and rip apart our own that Trump has appointed, then put it ALL out there for the American people to see," she wrote in an X post.
Greene's dare to the GOP comes as the House Ethics Committee weighs releasing a report on Gaetz, a former congressman from Florida accused of having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled house party and paying two other adult women for sex. The panel also explored allegations that Gaetz took bribes while in office.
After Gaetz resigned from Congress last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., urged the panel to shelve the report. Gaetz, for his part, is echoing Trump's playbook of characterizing all accusations against him as being part of a political witch hunt.
Threatening her colleagues, Greene has also claimed to have filed her own ethics report — she did not expand on its contents — and said it should be released along with "all your sexual harassment and assault claims that were secretly settled paying off victims with tax payer money, the entire Jeffrey Epstein files, tapes, recordings, witness interviews but not just those, there’s more, Epstein wasn’t/isn’t the only asset."
“If we’re going to dance, let’s all dance in the sunlight. I’ll make sure we do," she wrote.
Greene's House colleagues did not rush to back her proposal. CNN reported in 2017 that Congress has paid $17 million to victims of sexual harassment and discrimination via the Office of Compliance since it was created in 1995.
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