The House Ethics Committee secretly voted to release its report into former Rep. Matt Gaetz‘s conduct before the end of the year, according to a report.
The report’s findings are expected to be made public following the House’s final votes this year and as lawmakers take off from D.C. for the holidays, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
The release would culminate a three-year probe into allegations of child sex trafficking involving a 17-year-old girl, illicit drug use and other improprieties against Gaetz, the man Donald Trump had initially tapped to be his attorney general—the top law-enforcement official in the U.S. before he pulled out last month of the running.
The report is believed to include testimony from two women, whose lawyer said Gaetz paid them for sex in payments totally $10,000 from from May 2018 to late January 2019.
One woman claimed she saw Gaetz having sex with a minor at a drug-heavy party in 2017. The women said Gaetz paid them through cash apps, including from an account belonging to Nestor Galban, who Gaetz has called his “adopted son.”
The 42-year-old, who denied all of the allegations against him, blasted the potential release of the report.
“The Biden/Garland DOJ spent years reviewing allegations that I committed various crimes. I was charged with nothing: FULLY EXONERATED. Not even a campaign finance violation. And the people investigating me hated me,” he said on X.
“Then, the very ‘witnesses’ DOJ deemed not-credible were assembled by House Ethics to repeat their claims absent any cross-examination or challenge from me or my attorneys. I’ve had no chance to ever confront any accusers. I’ve never been charged. I’ve never been sued,” he continued.
It is unusual but not unheard of for an ethics report to be released after a member of Congress has left Congress, as Gaetz did shortly after Trump announced him as the initial nominee for attorney general.
His swift departure came just days before the House Ethics Committee was set to meet to decide whether to release the report’s findings.
House Speaker Mike Johnson urged the panel at the time not to release the report, and the committee ultimately voted along party lines in late November to not make its contents public.
It’s unclear what has prompted the panel to change course.
Since the vote last month, Gaetz withdrew himself from the running to be attorney general, citing that his nomination “was unfairly becoming a distraction” to the Trump administration.
Nevertheless, Democrats in both chambers—and even some Republicans—wanted to read the findings.
A lawyer for the unnamed woman with whom Gaetz allegedly had sex when she was 17 confirmed to ABC News at the time that she reported her story to the Ethics Committee.
ABC News had reported that the other two women featured in the Gaetz ethics saga also testified that he took them on a trip to New York City, where he paid them for sex and took them to see a Broadway musical adaptation of Pretty Woman, which depicts a man falling in love with a prostitute.
