An alleged orgy with prostitutes. Allegations of having sex with an underage girl. A trophy photo of a woman wearing only a hula hoop. And a complicated extortion plot involving a likely deceased US hostage in Iran.
Even by Florida standards, the Matt Gaetz saga is downright bizarre – and getting stranger by the day.
Before this week, the young Sunshine State congressman and ally of former President Donald Trump, like his mentor, was best known for his ambitious conservatism and cape of the Cape.
But this week, the Republican faced scandalous headlines on a daily basis.
Most seriously, he is under investigation by the Justice Department for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old girl, and for having paid to travel with him across state lines, possibly in violation of federal laws for sex trafficking.
Gaetz denies the allegations, but not the fact of the investigation.
Then, on Thursday, CNN claimed he showed fellow lawmakers nude photos of women he said he slept with, including one photographed with a hula hoop, and nothing else.
There are also claims by two of Gaetz’s enemies that the FBI has pictures of him in a “sexual orgy with underage prostitutes.”
It’s all enough to show his love of posing on Instagram without pants, as he did in a July post in which he titled “Covid work!” seem tame by comparison.
This is how the latest Gaetz drama has played out so far:
News of the sex trafficking investigation, launched in the last months of the latest administration, broke in The New York Times on Tuesday.
The pensacola bachelor, 38 – whose engagement to Harvard business school student Ginger Luckey, 26, was announced on Twitter in December by Fox’s Jeanine Pirro – immediately denied having sex with a minor or transporting anyone across state lines.
“In the strongest possible terms. I deny that I have ever been with anyone who is a minor, ”he told The Post on Tuesday.
“That’s not true,” he insisted.
But Gaetz had only raised more eyebrows when he admitted to the Times that some of his past “generosity” to former friends might haunt him.
“All I know is that it has to do with women,” he told the paper when asked what he knew about the investigation.
“I suspect someone is trying to recategorise my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more obnoxious.”
Soon, a new wave of headlines – including victims of underage sex trafficking, an orgy, and a $ 25 million extortion plot – showed how much more unwanted things could come.
Hours after the Times story came out, Gaetz did an interview on Fox News with Tucker Carlson.
He was ostensibly there in front of the camera to clear things up.
Instead, Gaetz wove a twisty tale portraying him and his father, Don, a wealthy former Florida politician, as the heroic victims of a massive blackmail plot.
“What is happening,” he told Carlson of the DOJ leak to the Times, “is an extortion of me and my family involving a former Justice Department official.”
That ex-officer, the villain of his alleged racketeering plot, is attorney David McGee, a former Florida federal prosecutor, Gaetz alleged.
“On March 16, my father got a text message demanding a meeting,” said Gaetz. “In which one person demanded $ 25 million in exchange for the disappearance of horrific sex trafficking allegations,” he told Carlson.
He and his father contacted the FBI, “and the FBI and the Justice Department were so concerned about this attempted extortion of a member of Congress that they asked my father to carry a wire,” Gaetz told Carlson.
The FBI must release the resulting tape, he told Carlson, claiming it would prove his innocence and “reveal a plot to make my family bleed without money.”
McGee leaked the DOJ sex traffic investigation to the Times when the extortion plot failed, Gaetz concluded in the shocking interview.
Then there is the Iranian hostage situation.
McGee and ex-Air Force intelligence officer Bob Kent didn’t necessarily want the money for themselves, Gaetz claims.
They wanted to use the money to free Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who was held hostage by Iran in 2007 and pronounced dead by his family last year.
Oh, and about those sex trafficking allegations?
“Providing flights and hotel rooms for people you are dating who are of legal age is not a crime,” Gaetz told Carlson, a denial who may have done less to clear his name than he intended. .
McGee, meanwhile, has denied allegations of Gaetz’s hostage-extortion, calling them “a blatant attempt to distract him from being investigated for underage sex trafficking,” as he told The Washington Post.
And McGee is fighting Gaetz with his own banner headlines.
Which finally brings us to the alleged orgy.
Gaetz has shown the Washington Examiner a series of text messages and other documents that he says contain details of the alleged blackmail attempt by McGee and Kent – including the couple’s reference to the FBI with photos of the Congressman in a “ sexual orgy with underage prostitutes’.
The document has not been verified and the redundant reference to a “sexual orgy” is not elaborated.
Text messages surfaced Friday that would link Gaetz to Joel Greenberg, a Seminole County political ally and tax official who is being prosecuted for underage sex trafficking.
It was Greenberg’s prosecution – for allegedly creating a false identity card for an underage girl “to facilitate his attempts at commercial sex acts” – that first put Gaetz on the FBI’s radar.
Texts obtained by the Daily Beast seem to show that in September Greenberg helped Gaetz get some sort of IDs out of the proper channels, although it is not stated why.
The congressman repeatedly boasted to unnamed wrist in Florida about women he met through Greenberg – he even flashed around in videos at parties of them in various stages of undressing, The Washington Post meanwhile reported Friday night.
And every other week, his communications director, Luke Ball, who is from Florida, cleared entries of Gaetz from his Twitter biography and handed in his resignation.
“The office of Congressman Matt Gaetz and Luke Ball agreed it would be best to part ways,” a joint statement read. “We thank him for his time in our office and wish him the best of luck.”