Tag Archive for: Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL)

Trump Sends His Clearest Message Yet To DOJ Bureaucrats With Unexpected Leadership Picks

President-elect Donald Trump’s unexpected picks for Department of Justice (DOJ) leadership roles send a clear message to the establishment: this term, his agenda will not be held captive by career bureaucrats.

After being burned by his own choices in his first administration and prosecuted by the Biden-Harris DOJ, his decision to nominate Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general and his defense attorneys for the other top slots reflects Trump’s desire to be surrounded by people who fully support his vision for the department — and who are willing to stand up to bureaucratic forces working to undermine his efforts.

“Gaetz is clearly an outsider and disruptor, and that’s the point,” former federal prosecutor Andrew Cherkasky told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gaetz is “exactly what President Trump promised for the DOJ during his campaign, namely to end the department’s left-leaning focus on lawfare, censorship, and election interference.” He’s “a loyalist who is often in Trump’s orbit” that won’t put up the same resistance as former Attorney General William Barr, Cherkasky said.

Article III project senior counsel Will Chamberlain wrote on X the Gaetz pick is best understood as “a statement by Trump that it’s not 2016 anymore and there will be no internal coup against the sitting President.”

Trump’s surprise announcement of Gaetz drew its share of criticism — and uncertainty about his viability as a nominee.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in the National Review that Nathan Wade, who worked on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ case against Trump before a judge’s ruling forced him to step down over the pair’s romantic relationship, would “have a better chance of getting confirmed” as attorney general than Gaetz.

“Trump needs a strong, experienced hand who is widely respected for his or her legal acumen and bureaucratic know-how — specifically in the Justice Department, which is certain to chew up and spit out an outsider who doesn’t know how the place works and how veteran adversaries can sabotage a novice,” McCarthy said, suggesting Gaetz is not qualified for the position because he was “among the leading proponents of the effort to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

Gaetz is the “100,000-volt option” that both shows Trump values an outsider and sets the stage for “one of the most intense confirmation fights in congressional history,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote Thursday.

“The nomination may have a curious effect on the nomination fights,” he said on X. “It will likely draw fire and resources from other nominees. Indeed, other nominees may appear less controversial by comparison.”

Cherkasky told the DCNF Trump’s relative silence in response to Republican South Dakota Sen. John Thune’s election as Senate majority leader indicates he feels “confident he will be able to secure his pick,” noting he probably would have raised more of a “public outcry” if Thune hadn’t promised support.

Trump’s selections for the three positions below attorney general also signal loyalty played a key role in his decision.

The attorneys who spent this year defending Trump from criminal prosecution have now also been named to top positions at the DOJ. Trump nominated Todd Blanch to be deputy attorney general, Emil Bove as principal associate deputy attorney general and Dean John Sauer — who presented oral arguments in Trump’s presidential immunity appeal before the Supreme Court — as solicitor general.

These Trump picks were met with greater enthusiasm from some conservative attorneys.

“John Sauer, who is President-elect Trump’s selection for Solicitor General, is a brilliant lawyer with rich experience,” wrote Ethics and Public Policy center constitutional scholar Ed Whelan, who expressed disapproval of Gaetz’s nomination. “Exactly the caliber of pick we should hope for in every senior DOJ position.”

Sauer also argued a major case challenging the Biden administration’s censorship efforts before the 5th Circuit.

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who served in Trump’s first administration, celebrated Blanche and Bove but didn’t mention Gaetz.

“Critics of unfit appointees should applaud when the President picks qualified people with integrity,” Rosenstein wrote Friday on X. “As Deputy AG, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove won’t allow partisanship to sway DOJ prosecutions. The rule of law prevails. Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur.”

‘Savvy And Bold’ Leadership

Beyond the top positions, Trump’s allies are concerned about opposition from career prosecutors who are tasked with carrying out leadership directives.

“If the president wants to deport illegal aliens, secure the border, ban race-based ‘affirmative action’ and DEI, investigate antisemitism, halt Big Tech censorship, grant pardons and commutations to Jan 6th defendants, he has every right to expect that these perfectly lawful policies are implemented, and it is absolutely unacceptable for career employees to seek to thwart this policy agenda,” attorney Mark Paoletta, who is helping with Trump’s transition, wrote on X Wednesday.

Article III Project founder Mike Davis wrote on X that DOJ employees’ job is to “carry out his lawful orders.”

Career prosecutors are worried they’ll be driven out of the department, Politico reported on Sunday, days before Trump announced Gaetz’s nomination.

Stacey Young, co-founder of the DOJ Gender Equality Network and civil rights division attorney, told the outlet many federal employees are “terrified that we’ll be replaced with partisan loyalists.”

Another DOJ attorney anonymously told Politico department lawyers are “losing their minds.”

“The fear is that career leadership and career employees everywhere are either going to leave or they’re going to be driven out,” the attorney said.

Along with bringing two criminal cases against Trump, the Biden-Harris DOJ prosecuted hundreds of individuals for their behavior at the Capitol on Jan. 6 using an obstruction statute designed to target financial crimes. The Supreme Court held in June the DOJ interpreted the statute too broadly.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has repeatedly used the Freedom of Access to Clinics (FACE) Act to prosecute pro-life activists.

Paoletta noted the constitution invests executive power with the president, not “unelected lawyers who are to assist him in the exercise of that power.”

“Any civil servant who claims their actions to resist these policy initiatives will be doing so to uphold the rule of law is being dishonest,” he wrote. “They are undermining the rule of law and subverting democracy and should be fired.”

John Malcolm, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the DCNF career prosecutors dissatisfied with the department’s direction should “consider leaving and joining the private sector.”

“The one thing they should not, and cannot, do is to try to undermine the directives of their superiors within the department,” he said. “After all, they were not elected by the American people or appointed by the President to serve in his administration. Anyone who attempts to sabotage the President’s agenda from within should be severely reprimanded and reassigned or fired for insubordination.”

One reason the department needs “savvy and bold” leadership is because career employees who disagree with leadership sometimes “find quiet ways to undermine the work,” Jesse Panuccio, who previously served as the third-ranking official in Trump’s DOJ, told the DCNF.

“If someone’s not willing to do the job, there’s plenty of meat and potatoes work at the Department of Justice that they can be reassigned to,” Panuccio said.

“If they want to be activists, there are lots of think tanks and 501(c)(3)s and law firms they can go work at in Washington,” he continued. “They do not need to be on the payroll of the taxpayers who just elected this president and endorsed the policies and people he’s going to appoint.”

AUTHOR

Katelynn Richardson

Contributor

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Attorney General Matt Gaetz: The Pitbull We Need

“Anyone who is more concerned with the prospect of Gaetz being Attorney General than the deep state’s behavior, is part of the problem.” — Mollie Hemingway


As a victim of the DOJ, Gaetz is the best person to reform it.

WATCH: Attorney General Matt Gaetz: The Pitbull We Need

We Need To Take A Wrecking Ball To The DOJ. Matt Gaetz Is Just The Man For The Job

By: John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist, November 14, 2024

Gaetz isn’t ‘unqualified’ to lead the Justice Department. As a victim of the DOJ, he might be the best person to reform it.

The collective pearl-clutching by the corporate press and Washington establishment on Wednesday after Trump announced he’d chosen Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general was something to behold. The swamp consensus is that the former Florida congressman is “unqualified” to lead the Justice Department.

Never mind that the people making this claim are themselves deeply unqualified to hold their own positions of power. (Consider Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who dismissed Gaetz as not a “serious” pick. Murkowski is poster-child for unserious and unqualified Beltway drones. She failed the bar exam four times and only got a Senate seat because her corrupt father, Frank Murkowski, appointed her to his seat after he became a one-term governor of Alaska in 2002.)

But how exactly is Gaetz unqualified to lead the Justice Department? Put another way, what does Trump’s incoming attorney general need to be qualified to do?

Mostly, clean house at the DOJ. Going back at least to 2016, the Justice Department has been a viper’s nest of politically motivated prosecutions, sham investigations, coup-plotting, domestic spying and censorship, entrapment schemes, and the terrorization of law-abiding Americans. From illegally spying on Trump to the political persecution of Jan. 6 defendants, the DOJ has become a cancer on our body politic, and we need someone to go in and cut it out.

Above all, we need a Justice Department that will refrain from trying to undermine or remove the duly elected president. As Will Chamberlain noted on X, “The best way to understand the Gaetz pick is that it’s a statement by Trump that it’s not 2016 anymore and there will be no internal coup against the sitting President.”

What we don’t need, after the plots against Trump during his first term and four years of a totally weaponized DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland, is business as usual. We don’t need some career GOP prosecutor to be the “adult in the room” and “restrain Trump from his worst impulses.”

No, we need someone who knows firsthand how corrupt and compromised the Justice Department has become under Garland, and couldn’t care less what’s said about him at Georgetown cocktail parties or on MSNBC.

And since Gaetz himself was one of the more prominent victims of Garland’s politicized DOJ, he might just be the perfect person for the job. Beginning in March 2021, Gaetz was subjected to an 18-month sham DOJ investigation based on nothing more than the publication of an anonymously sourced and frankly outlandish report accusing him of possibly being a child sex trafficker.

He was never convicted and never even charged, but that was never the point. The point was to silence him. Prior to March 2021 Gaetz had been an effective and prominent voice in Congress pushing back against the Washington establishment’s worst impulses and abuses of power. He waged a public relations battle against Democrats and the deep state over the Russia collusion hoax, led a group of Republican congressmen protesting Rep. Adam Schiff’s sham Ukraine impeachment hearings, and raised concerns about Washington’s overreaction to the Jan. 6 riot and the politically motivated prosecutions of those involved. Gaetz frequently appeared on cable news to make his case, and he quickly became one of the most influential conservative congressmen.

But all that changed when Garland’s DOJ targeted him after a series of politically motivated leaks to The New York Times by anonymous DOJ lawyers. The Times dutifully published them, tarring Gaetz’s good name. As my colleague Mollie Hemingway wrote in 2022, the goal was to silence the colorful Florida congressmen by destroying his reputation: “Gaetz couldn’t very well critique the Department of Justice for their political prosecutions if he was a pariah who everyone thought was a pedophile.”

And that’s exactly what happened. The Democrat-run Ethics Committee in the House, which usually waits to launch investigations of sitting members of Congress until after the DOJ concludes its own investigation, immediately launched an ethics probe against Gaetz that was still ongoing when he announced his resignation from the House on Wednesday. Never Trump Republicans with an axe to grind, like then-Rep. Liz Cheney, reveled in the accusations against Gaetz and repeated them nearly as often as the corporate press did.

Eighteen months later, after the media had repeated the pedophile and sex trafficker accusations against Gaetz as often as they could, with Gaetz’s reputation and influence in tatters, the DOJ investigation was quietly dropped. Another anonymously sourced story, this time in The Washington Post, simply said senior career prosecutors recommended no charges.

That’s the kind of thing our Justice Department does now. Together with a corrupt and lawless FBI, it viciously attacks its critics through lies, leaks, and unrelenting lawfare. It gins up fake kidnapping plots like the one against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. It looks the other way when assassination plots and violent threats are leveled at Supreme Court justices. It illegally targets members of Congress. Anyone who threatens its power, including the former and soon-to-be president, is fair game.

The last thing Trump needs at DOJ is a Bill Barr-style careerist. The department is rotten to the core and a threat to the American people. Most of the careerists there need to be run out of the place—and then criminally investigated.

That means a willingness, determination, and courage to clean up and reform the Justice Department — or, barring that, dismantle it completely — are the only qualifications necessary to head Trump’s DOJ. So yes, Gaetz is more than qualified for the task at hand. In fact he’s probably just the man for the job.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

AUTHOR

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Socialist Speaker of the House Johnson Soon To Be Endorsed By His Communist Democrat Pals

Next week House Speaker Johnson will be delivered his pink slip by the few “real” Republicans left in Congress. Will Mike Johnson lose his job? Probably not because the Communist Democrats and the fraud Republican uni-party protect him. Speaker Johnson is delivering for the Biden agenda like a Grub hub delivery driver.

His betrayal of the American people and his unconstitutional decision to continue spying on American citizens without a warrant will be addressed on the House floor.

His funding of the military industrial complex which continues the global wars without oversight using our tax money without securing our own borders will be addressed.

The fraud Speaker of the House funded the continuing mass slaughter of pre-born children up to 9 months in the womb in states still killing these babies.

He funded the FBI and their brand new building after the FBI raided President Trumps home. He funded the DOJ after they filed fraudulently charges against him.

Next week (May 2024) we will get to see which republicans support this bottom feeding fraud Republican House Speaker when a vote is presented to terminate his leadership position.

Let’s watch the Communist Democrats get behind this fraud republican. It will be entertaining to see Democrats backing a Republican. We will soon know too which republicans are backing this Socialist spineless, weak House Speaker.

My friends Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are the glue holding the conservative base together. History will speak highly of them in the future. If House Speaker Johnson really loves this country, our constitutional republic he would resign his position.

I can’t convince my Congressional friends to leave the do nothing Republican Party and become independents. The GOP is nothing more than extension of installed Marxist Joe Biden’s Communist anti American agenda. Our Founding Fathers definitely were all independents.

But stay tuned for an entertaining political civil war commencing soon on the House floor. It will separate the men from the boys just like one of those San Francisco Nancy Pelosi Democrat party fundraisers.

©2024. Geoff Ross. All rights reserved.

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