What's in the House rules report by Matt Gaetz

The House Ethics Committee's report on Donald Trump's aide Matt Gaetz released on Monday revealed new details about the former congressman's alleged misconduct, at least new allegations and details in the panel's investigation.

From at least 2017 to 2020, the committee concluded that the former Florida minister regularly paid women for “sexual intercourse”, had sex with a 17-year-old girl, used or possessed illegal drugs, accepted gifts beyond House limits and helped. the woman gets a passport, according to the report.

Gaetz, who resigned from the US House of Representatives in November – days before the report was made public and after Trump announced his candidacy for US attorney general – denied the committee's findings and accused him of mishandling the investigation.

Here are four parts of the highly anticipated report that stand out.

Estates investigators said Gaetz paid more than $90,000 (£71,843) to women for sex and drugs, but created a complex web of transactions that were difficult to trace, according to the report.

“The committee was unable to fully determine how much of Representative Gaetz's payment to the women was compensation for engaging in sex with him,” the report found.

It is alleged that he used his friend Joel Greenberg, who is currently serving 11 years in prison for crimes he says he committed with Gaetz, as a means of negotiating and accessing Greenberg's account on SeekingArrangement.com, which calls itself a “fancy dating site”, to connect with young women.

Gaetz also paid women directly, sometimes using platforms like Venmo, according to the report. But the committee said he often used someone else's PayPal account or an account linked to an email address with a fake name.

He also hid the payments, the panel wrote. In one example, you gave a college student a check made out to “cash” with “tuition refund” in the memo line. The woman said she got it after a group meeting, “which could be a form of coercion because I really needed the money”.

Gaetz wrote on social media that he gives money to women he works with as gifts, not payments. The committee found that two women, aged 27 and 25, did not consider it to be in their relationship.

One woman who was considered his girlfriend invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when asked if she was being paid for sex or drugs, or to pay others.

The committee tried to prove that Gaetz often paid for sex with a message explaining his inability to pay at one time.

His girlfriend at the time said in the message that she and Greenberg were “limited in their income” and asked the group of women “if it could be more than a week of customer appreciation”.

A few months later, according to the committee, he wrote: “Btw Matt also mentioned that he will be the cause of the last 'customer appreciation' charity.”

The committee also said Gaetz bought illegal drugs or gave people their money back.

It provides examples of his alleged use of cocaine and ecstasy/MDMA, but focuses on what appears to be a heavy marijuana habit. He allegedly asked women to bring boxes of marijuana to meetings and events, then opened an email with a fake name to buy marijuana.

The trip he took to the Bahamas was “paid for by his associate Representative Gaetz who is connected to the medical marijuana industry, who allegedly also paid female escorts to accompany him”, according to the report.

One woman felt that the use of drugs and alcohol at events impaired her ability to “really know what was going on or fully acknowledge it”.

“Indeed, almost every woman the committee spoke with could not recall the details of one or more events they attended with Representative Gaetz and claimed that it was related to the consumption of drugs or alcohol,” the report said.

His then-girlfriend, who was 21 when they met and was “paid tens of thousands of dollars” during their two-year relationship, often took part in meeting women and acting as an intermediary, according to the report.

The woman told the committee she was 17 years old when she had sex with Gaetz twice at a party in 2017 — at least once in front of other people — during a period of pleasure. The woman, who had just finished her junior year of high school, then received $400 from him.

He also told the panel that he did not tell Gaetz that he was a minor and the committee found no evidence that the former congressman knew he was a minor.

In 2021, Greenberg pleaded guilty to trafficking a girl for sex.

Gaetz is said to have also ordered his boss to speed up a passport application for a woman he is sleeping with who he says is a voter in his district. He allegedly also gave her $1,000.

Gaetz violated House rules prohibiting the use of his position to do special things, according to the committee, which wrote: “The woman was not her lawyer, and the case was not treated in the same way as cases of facilitating passports”.

The committee issued an extensive report detailing how Gaetz allegedly interfered with its investigation, including failing to produce evidence that he said would “exonerate” him.

The report concluded that he “has consistently sought to divert, obstruct, or mislead the Committee in order to prevent his actions from being disclosed”.

Gaetz, who accused the committee of “weaponizing” him and leaking information to the media, alleged that the committee was working for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, according to the report. Last year he helped lead efforts to oust former Speaker McCarthy from office.

Although Gaetz said he “voluntarily produced tens of thousands of records,” he provided the committee with “only a few hundred records, more than 90% of which were irrelevant or publicly available,” the report found.

One sore point was the trip to the Bahamas, where the committee said he withheld details. In the end it was concluded that he broke the gift rules because the trip was too expensive.

The committee also cited the Justice Department's investigation into the allegations against Gaetz as a reason for the delay.

Some witnesses asked the committee to use the statements given by the Department but it refused to share them because they did not release the charges and because it said that this may prevent future witnesses in other cases from coming forward.

The report concludes with a one-page statement from Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest “on behalf of the unnamed members of the opposition committee.”

Those members do not dispute the committee's findings, but they do not agree with issuing the report after Gaetz resigned, which has not happened since 2006, they write.

“It departs from the Committee's long-standing practice, it opens the Committee to unfair criticism, and some will see it as an attempt to strengthen the Committee's process”.