Bill Maher did not hold back on Matt Gaetz’s sex scandal in a Sunday interview with the disgraced congressman.
In an hourlong episode of the Club Random with Bill Maher podcast, the comedian pressed Gaetz on long-simmering allegations that he paid women—including a 17-year-old still in high school—for sex.
Gaetz has long denied all of the allegations.
“So, people want to know two basic things,” Maher asked. “One, was he ever with an underage girl?”
When Gaetz responded, “No,” Maher was quick to point out that the Department of Justice ended its investigation into Gaetz without filing charges.
“The Justice Department—this is Biden’s Justice Department—declined,” Maher said. “I can’t believe Biden’s Justice Department wouldn’t have wanted to get you if there was something. So the fact that they said ‘We got nothing’ tells us something.”
The DOJ launched an investigation into Gaetz in 2020 under then-Attorney General Bill Barr after Gaetz’s confidant, Joel Greenberg, pleaded guilty to a sex trafficking charge.
Greenberg admitted under a 2021 plea deal that he paid women and underaged girls to have sex with him and other men, who were not identified.
A bombshell report from the House Ethics Committee later revealed texts allegedly showing how Gaetz and Greenberg allegedly found women to have sex with.
Gaetz resigned as Florida congressman last year when President Donald Trump nominated him for attorney general. He later withdrew himself from consideration after he was hounded by questions about the alleged sexual misconduct.
“The [Ethics] committee typically refrains from releasing the findings if you’ve quit already,” Maher told Gaetz. “So why did they make an exception for you? You must have bitterness about that.”
Gaetz said he had no bad blood over the release of the report, noting that “everything goes out in Washington anyway.”
“If you think that this document wasn’t going to be released in one form or the other, then you don’t understand how the leak ecosystem works in that place,” he said.
Gaetz then alluded to his long-running beef with Kevin McCarthy, suggesting that the former House speaker he helped oust was behind the release of the damning report.
“To be honest, I have a lot of enemies on the Republican side, more so than most Republican members, because I killed the golden goose,” he said, referring to McCarthy.
