President-elect Donald Trump’s pick of Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general sent a clear signal through Washington on Wednesday that Trump intends for his Justice Department to take a sharp-elbowed, hyperpartisan approach to law and order — one that is both unquestioningly loyal to Trump and openly antagonistic toward his political opponents, legal and political experts said.
That approach, after all, has long been the norm for Gaetz, a hard-right member of the House since 2017 who is deeply unpopular among his Democratic and Republican colleagues, but has won praise from Trump by being unflinchingly defensive of the former and future president and openly derisive of the various state and federal criminal cases against him.
“If anything shows Trump will make no effort at unity or conciliation, it is this pick,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley School of Law.
Matt Gaetz with Donald Trump outside the New York courtroom where Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in May.
(Mike Segar / Pool photo via Associated Press)
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that Gaetz had submitted his resignation from Congress “effectively immediately,” in the hope that Florida officials can fill his House seat with another Republican by early January and the party’s thin majority in the chamber won’t be diminished as the next Trump administration gets underway.
Others noted that Gaetz’s departure from Congress also draws to a close an ongoing House ethics investigation against him.
Trump’s pick for the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement official has been closely watched, given the stakes. Trump won the presidential election despite being a convicted felon with multiple criminal cases pending against him, and after having promised to use the Justice Department to turn the tables and go after his political foes.
Gaetz, 42, has echoed Trump’s claims that the FBI and others within the Justice Department have been politically co-opted and weaponized in recent years to go after Republicans — including Gaetz himself, who was the subject of a federal sex trafficking investigation that ended with no charges last year.
The probe involved allegations that Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid her to travel with him. The separate investigation by the House Ethics Committee, which will now be closed out, was considering whether Gaetz “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use” and whether he “sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct,” among other things, the committee said in June.
Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing.
In announcing the selection, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that Gaetz had distinguished himself in the House in part by calling for reforms in the Justice Department, and that as attorney general he will “root out the systemic corruption” and return the department “to its true mission of fighting Crime, and upholding our Democracy and Constitution.”
“Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System,” Trump wrote.