Following the expulsion of former New York Rep. George Santos, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is fundraising off the possibility that the House might come after him next.
In a fundraising email sent Dec. 13 and obtained by the Washington Examiner, Gaetz makes a pitch to donors that now House Republicans have “removed one of our own members,” referring to Santos, “some RINOs are looking for their next target… ME.”
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“The Swamp dwellers don’t want anything to change, and they are willing to sell America down the river to protect their own interests,” the fundraising email says. “And since I refuse to play ball with these RINOs, they are secretly plotting behind closed doors and looking for ANYTHING they can use to expel me from Congress.”
The email ends by saying, “All I need to know is that folks like you continue to have my back if the time comes and they try to expel me.”
The fundraising email comes on the heels of reporting that the House Ethics Committee has ramped up its investigation into the Florida Republican.
In 2021, the committee, which was controlled by Democrats at the time, opened an investigation into Gaetz for a multitude of allegations, including that he engaged in sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, and converted campaign funds to personal use.
According to a source familiar with the matter, the investigation into Gaetz is still open. Additionally, earlier this month, CNN reported that the committee recently reached out to at least one witness to sit for an interview as part of its investigation.
“Oh, please,” Gaetz told reporters when asked about the committee ramping up its investigation. “I wish them luck.”
Gaetz repeatedly has denied all the allegations against him.
A spokesperson for the House Ethics Committee declined to comment.
When asked for comment on what the fundraising email was referencing and if it was about the ethics investigation, a Gaetz spokesperson referred the Washington Examiner to an online petition started in 2019 with nearly 90,000 signatures titled “Expel Matt Gaetz from Congress” as some of the ways people are looking to use anything to expel him.
The petition references how, on Oct. 23, 2019, Gaetz led a group of Republican members into a sensitive compartmented information facility in the Capitol, where a witness was giving testimony as part of the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry into then-President Donald Trump.
On Dec. 1, the House did vote to expel its first member of Congress in over 20 years when members ousted Santos following a damning ethics report.
Gaetz voted against the expulsion and took to the House Floor during the debate on the measure to voice his opposition to the precedent it would set. He made a point that he was not coming to the defense of Santos, rather, he was arguing against expelling someone solely based on an ethics report and not a conviction.
“I rise not to defend George Santos, whoever he is, but to defend the very precedent my colleagues are willing to shatter,” Gaetz said on the floor. “... Let's speak to due process. Mr. Santos hasn't been convicted of anything, but we haven't even moved to expel the people who have. Mr. Bowman pled guilty to a misdemeanor to his fire alarm stunt weeks ago. While they're marching to throw George Santos out of Congress, they take no action to someone who pled guilty to a crime? What's that about?
“The fact the Ethics Committee has done this incredible violation of precedent will do grave damage to this institution for many years to come because now there's no requirement of any conviction,” he continued.
The Florida Republican has been front and center throughout this year. From tanking bills he opposed to blocking the floor for a week over the summer in protest of the bipartisan debt ceiling deal Congress passed, Gaetz has accomplished just about everything he tried to do. But, most notably, he led the charge to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the speakership.
However, his actions this Congress have angered many members who viewed him as putting a personal vendetta over the good of the conference.
When he made the motion to vacate McCarthy, Gaetz cited policy differences and that the then-speaker was not staying true to his word. However, McCarthy and other members of the House viewed his vendetta against the speaker as purely personal and as retaliation for the ethics investigation.
“We all know it's the ethics complaint on Gaetz,” McCarthy told reporters last week. “He's doing everything to make sure it doesn't come out, and I mean, he doesn't care about anything else.”
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Gaetz has denied that this is the case.
“The McCarthy operation continues to try to make this some sort of personal beef,” Gaetz said in October after filing the motion to vacate. “No one seems to be really eager in engaging me on the substance of my argument, which is that we need single-subject spending bills we need to return to pre-COVID spending, but some people try to make every policy disagreement personal because they are so personally embarrassed from their own failures.”