The Gaetz Report Proves Merrick Garland to Be Earth’s Most Useless Human
Photo by The United States Department of Justice, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Matt Gaetz was too radioactive for the Republican Party. No one batted an eye when he left his seat to try to become Merrick Garland’s successor as Trump’s Bag Man Attorney General, and when he retreated to Cameo in the wake of his rejection, the GOP caucus mainly ignored it as the party was more than happy to watch this gigantic political liability slink away into oblivion. We know why now. Politico obtained a copy of the House Ethics Committee investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, which found “substantial evidence” that he committed statutory rape.
At a party in July 2017 at a Florida lobbyist’s home, Gaetz had sex twice with a 17-year-old, who had just completed her junior year of high school, according to the report. Florida’s age of consent is 18.In the testimony of the now 24-year-old woman, referred to as “Victim A,” she said that she had sex with Gaetz at “least once in the presence of other party attendees” and that she received $400 in cash from Gaetz, which she understood as a payment for sex. The woman also testified that she had ingested ecstasy before the sexual encounter and said that Gaetz used cocaine that same night as well.
Ethics investigators received evidence that Gaetz was unaware that Victim A was underage “until more than a month after their first sexual encounters” but noted that “statutory rape is a strict liability crime” — meaning it’s illegal whether he was aware of her age or not. Even after he learned that she was a minor, Gaetz kept in contact with her and then again “met up with her again for commercial sex” less than six months after she turned 18, the report alleges.
The report also contains a detailed chart of payments made by Gaetz to his friend and the women in question.
The House Subcommittee on Ethics report is … wild, galling, and gross.
It also includes a fairly brutal relationship retrospective re: Gaetz’s girlfriend…. ethics.house.gov/wp-content/u…
— Leah Litman (@leahlitman.bsky.social) December 23, 2024 at 9:01 AM
Merrick Garland’s Justice Department investigated Matt Gaetz, presumably with more legal resources than a House Ethics Committee, and in 2023, they announced they would not charge Matt Gaetz with any crimes. They did, however, get his former friend Joel Greenberg to plead guilty to sex trafficking of a minor, identity theft, stalking, wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe a public official in 2021 in a deal with prosecutors where he was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
I am no lawyer, but I have a very hard time understanding how Merrick Garland got one but not the other given the $3,950 paid by Gaetz to Greenberg from 2018 to 2019. As Michael Liroff, co-host of the 5-4 Podcast about the Supreme Court, said on Bluesky, “did merrick garland merely give gaetz a pass for raping a minor or did he actively engage in a coverup of gaetz raping a minor? hard to know for sure!”
Then I read this 2023 profile of Garland in Politico and it all made sense, particularly this passage.
“He’s a person of D.C.,” one person who has worked closely with Garland told me. “He knows this stuff and how it works, but this is not the game that he delights in playing or has spent his career playing,” the person explained, adding that Garland “didn’t come from this super elite background, but he mastered it,” and that he was known to keep tabs on “polling and movements in D.C.,” at the Justice Department and elsewhere.
The profile notes that “Garland lived a life devoid of any legitimate public controversy,” and I finally understand why he is so afraid of a fight. It’s his brand. Nay, it’s who he is as a learned Very Serious center-left creature of our nation’s capital. Merrick Garland is terrified of people like Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump, because they force “controversy” on anyone who engages them, so as to weed out the feckless boobs like Merrick Garland who naively believe that power exercises itself.
Garland investigated Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, which is a thing we all saw happen out in the open, and he made a big deal about how Very Serious it was to launch an inquiry into a man the FBI has been investigating since at least 1981. His former Harvard professor Laurence Tribe seemed to believe he would charge Trump in that 2023 Politico profile, saying Garland’s sense of precedent is in part based on “Lincoln’s sense that even if something will cause enormous unrest but it’s absolutely necessary to fulfill the legal principles that you hold fast to, you’ve got to do it.”
Clearly, Garland is not the hero even his most ardent backers believe him to be. Tribe’s other sense of Garland’s legal principles was “cit[ing] George Washington’s emphasis on not holding onto power,” which his student took to literal levels not seen in modern history. Like nearly all Attorney General Garland projects, the Trump prosecution ended with his tail between his legs as he scurried back to his comfortable seat in the D.C. swamp at the feet of the cowardly Democratic gerontocrats driving us to hell. These people have never met a fight they weren’t paralyzed by, and Garland is the legal avatar for this kind of politician whose legacy will be greasing the wheels on our empire’s descent into the dustbin of history.
Merrick Garland is the logical legal conclusion of a political party whose entire concept of justice is shaming voters into doing their jobs for them. Now we all have to live in a world with a Trumpfied DOJ where if we just had a few more unhinged psychos in the GOP Senate caucus, Attorney General Matt Gaetz could be a real thing we had to deal with. Had this happened, Merrick Garland would have been the one of the main reasons why due to his clear fear of prosecuting politicians. This Gaetz report is damning, and if you, like Merrick Garland, can read detailed descriptions of him committing statutory rape in concert with an admitted underage sex trafficker and conclude that he should walk free without being charged, you may also be earth’s most useless human.