How Matt Gaetz poisoned the House Ethics Committee

Scandal-ridden former Rep. Matt Gaetz is gone from Congress, but the wounds he inflicted on the House Ethics Committee that investigated him remain fresh.

After the longest delay in recent history, the panel finally recruited enough members to perform its grim mandate of governing fellow lawmakers’ conduct in the 119th Congress. And they’ll have their work cut out for them: The committee is still regrouping from its crisis late last year over whether to break with recent precedent and release the results of an investigation into their former Florida GOP colleague, who was being considered for attorney general.

The Ethics Committee rarely releases findings of investigations into lawmakers who resign before those investigations can conclude. Gaetz tested that practice, with lawmakers on both sides arguing the information was critical for senators to review in advance of his confirmation hearings.

Gaetz ended up withdrawing from consideration, but it doesn't stop disagreements over how to proceed within the notoriously private committee from spilling out into the open, with finger pointing over the source of leaks potentially coming from inside the panel’s ranks. Democrats accused some Republicans of trying to shield Gaetz from scrutiny over allegations of illicit drug use and paying a minor for sex.

The Ethics Committee is never a coveted assignment, which means party leaders will inevitably have a difficult time finding members to reconstitute the panel, said one GOP lawmaker granted anonymity to speak candidly.

“Nobody ever wants to sit on the committee,” the lawmaker said in an interview.

But the Gaetz episode has contributed to conditions from which the Ethics Committee could struggle to fully recover, former members said in interviews. It could plunge the panel into further dysfunction as the committee prepares in the coming weeks to ramp up after a monthslong delay and a pileup of potential cases.

“It is a monster cloud,” former Rep. Mike Conaway, who served as Ethics Committee chair from 2013-2015, said of the allegations of leaks in the previous Congress that could plague the panel’s current membership.

House Republican leaders tapped GOP Rep. Michael Guest of Missouri to return as committee chair, joining repeat Reps. John Rutherford (R-Fla.), Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) and Glenn Ivey (D-Md.).

New Republican members assigned to the Ethics Committee will be Reps. Nathaniel Moran of Texas and Ashley Hinson of Iowa. Democratic leadership tapped Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas to join the committee, and selected Rep. Mark DeSaulnier of California as the new ranking member.

Among their first items of business might be resuming an investigation held over from the previous Congress into Rep. Cory Mills, a Florida Republican who drew attention last month over allegations of assault by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.

Paramount to the committee’s integrity on all matters is its strict code of confidentiality: Members agree never to speak in any capacity about its pending business, on or off the record. After the events surrounding Gaetz, however, it’s not clear that confidentiality is still guaranteed.

A flurry of news reports late last year revealed how members of the Ethics Committee were fighting over how to handle the Gaetz situation — insider information that spilled out into the public domain. Finger-pointing abounded as to who was leaking the private details, including the fact that there was a split secret vote on whether to release the Gaetz report.

These events also obliterated the longstanding presumption of nonpartisanship inside the committee, which is the only panel evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Guest called the report’s release a “dangerous departure with potentially catastrophic consequences.” Speaker Mike Johnson had said he did not want the report to be public.

In a further divide, as the Ethics Committee deliberated on next steps, Democrats were making procedural moves to force a vote on the House floor to release the report on Gaetz. Rep. Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat leading that effort, recently called the Ethics Committee “a speed bump on the road to hell [Johnson] is driving himself on.”

“Everything’s become so partisan, and if [the committee] hasn’t become actually partisan, there’s suspicions of partisanship regardless of what people do or say,” said former Rep. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who served on the Ethics Committee from 2011-2013, in an interview. “It undermines any decision the committee makes.”

Yarmuth added, “If you attack the credibility of the Ethics Committee, then nobody fears the Ethics Committee … I think you’d want to be afraid of running afoul of the Ethics Committee.”

Former Rep. Gregg Harper, a Mississippi Republican who served on the panel alongside Yarmuth, in the private sector now represents lawmakers who have cases pending before the House Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional Ethics, a nonpartisan entity tasked with vetting outside complaints against lawmakers before sending them to the formal committee.

He said the decision to release the report on Gaetz after he had already left Congress undermined one of the key motivators of the Ethics Committee: Pushing bad acting lawmakers out of office. After all, Gaetz’s decision to resign from the House following his nomination to be attorney general by then-President-elect Donald Trump was widely seen as an effort to avoid the release of a damning report into his alleged misconduct that could foil his chances for confirmation.

“It’s always been understood, ‘hey, if you’re in a mess, you leave — get out of there, don’t come back,’” Harper said in an interview. “The reality is sometimes a member needs to leave … one motivation to leave is, ‘Okay, I can put this behind me, and there won’t be anything else that I’ll to deal with, maybe, in the press.’”

Harper and Yarmuth both recalled the discomfort they experienced when leadership drafted them into serving on the Ethics Committee. Harper said his colleagues asked if then-Speaker John Boehner was “mad at you about something?” Yarmuth said he was approached on the House floor by Rep. Maxine Waters, during the committee’s investigation into her dealings with a bank in which her husband had a financial interest.

“How can you do this?” Yarmuth said Waters would repeatedly plead with him on the floor.

In a sign that leaders of the reconstituted Ethics Committee are for the time being adhering to the rules, a spokesperson for DeSauliner referred comment for this story to the panel’s staff director — whose job it is to interface with the media — citing confidentiality policies. The staff director, in turn, declined to comment. A spokesperson for Guest also referred press inquiries to the staff director.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who was the chair of the Ethics Committee from 2009-2011 — during which time she oversaw the investigation that culminated in a rare censure of a fellow member of her own party, the late-Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York, for tax violations — said she wasn’t sure where the panel would go from here.

“It’s very difficult,” she conceded, when asked about the future of the panel in the wake of the Gaetz report. “But they operate with discretion, so we really don’t know the details.”