Well they both like young females... Birds of a feather, etcetera, etcetera. Trump, a Florida Man Under Federal Investigation, Endorses Gaetz, a Florida Man Under Federal Investigation https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/tr...tz-a-florida-man-under-federal-investigation/
So does this mean that Gaetz and Donald Sr. are not close buddies? Donald Trump Jr. fights rumors Matt Gaetz is Mar-a-Lago 'informant' at Gaetz campaign event https://www.rawstory.com/matt-gaetz-mar-a-lago-informant/
The clock is ticking... Eight Sources Say Feds Are Not Done With Matt Gaetz CALM BEFORE THE STORM? It’s been a quiet few months in the probe into allegations that the Florida congressman was involved in underage sex trafficking. But few involved think it’s over. https://www.thedailybeast.com/eight-sources-say-feds-are-not-done-with-matt-gaetz When Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) beat his primary challenger Tuesday, he delivered a speech to family and friends predicting an easy repeat victory in November that would allow him to remain with “Republicans with a will to fight and a backbone.” There was, predictably, no mention of the underage sex trafficking investigation that could one day be catastrophic to his political career. That federal probe that generated national attention for a few weeks last year has since quieted down. But it’s not over. Eight people with direct knowledge of the probe confirmed to The Daily Beast that the case is still unfolding—albeit at a methodical pace—as federal prosecutors work their way across a number of spokes of possible criminality. While each zone has its own sets of witnesses, subjects, and targets, all of it spirals out from one man: a crooked local tax official and Gaetz’s former “wingman,” Joel Greenberg. Lyle Mazin, a criminal defense attorney who represents a witness in the case, told The Daily Beast that the quiet should not be misconstrued as reluctance on the part of Roger Handberg, a federal prosecutor who led the local team conducting the investigation and now leads the Florida Middle District U.S. Attorney’s Office. “He’s methodical. He doesn’t let anything go,” Mazin said. “If you’re going after a monster, you have to get it right—especially when you have a bunch of Trump supporters who’ll come after you.” No one who spoke to The Daily Beast believes that the Gaetz probe was closed, and defense attorneys for witnesses and subjects who have recently enjoyed a quiet season said they expect to hear from prosecutors again. Some have struck agreements for advance notice of charging decisions. A Gaetz spokeswoman did not return a request for comment. Gaetz flatly denies all allegations of wrongdoing. A lawyer for one person already charged in the case told The Daily Beast that, in his experience, the prosecutors have “always been tight on the timeline.” “They only strike when the case is tightly built, unfortunately,” this lawyer said. That day, if it comes, is likely still months off. Two attorneys said prosecutors will take extreme steps to avoid the appearance of interfering with the midterms, and expected any announcements involving Gaetz would likely come several weeks after the November election. One bizarre turn in the Gaetz saga ended Monday after a federal judge handed down a five-year prison sentence to Stephen M. Alford, a Florida man who attempted to defraud the Gaetz family. Alford somehow caught wind of the sex trafficking probe and promised Gaetz a presidential pardon, which Alford knew he could not deliver, if the family would shell out $25 million to allegedly spring a U.S. hostage held in Iran. The investigation into Gaetz himself is only one item in an expanding queue. The probe of Greenberg alone has uncovered so many layers of public corruption in Central Florida that investigators have had to peel them apart one by one: illicit real estate deals; embezzlement of federal COVID-19 paycheck assistance; a local Republican scheme to run “ghost” candidates; a public corruption plot involving a number of powerful state figures; and ultimately the sex trafficking investigation involving the congressman himself. In late 2020, while Greenberg was angling for a presidential pardon, he wrote a confession letter—obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast—detailing the way Gaetz would use him as a middleman to pay for sex with young women and at least one underage girl. Greenberg’s non-public Venmo payments—also obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast—reflected that arrangement. In one example, Gaetz paid his buddy $900, writing in one memo field, “hit up ___,” using a nickname for the formerly underage girl, who by then had just turned 18. Greenberg was charged with trafficking that teen in August 2020. The Daily Beast confirmed that the FBI opened its investigation into Gaetz the same month. After confessing to the trafficking a minor charge last May, Greenberg struck a plea deal with federal prosecutors in Orlando. Since then, investigators have been using the information he shared to target his accomplices one at a time. In May, the region’s state attorney criminally charged Seminole County Republican Party chair Ben Paris and two others for hatching a scheme to run a non-existent “ghost” candidate. The operation drew votes away from Democratic candidate Patricia Sigman and propelled Republican candidate and Gaetz ally Jason Brodeur into the Florida state senate. (The Gaetz campaign donated to Brodeur months after the victory.) On Tuesday, state prosecutors filed documents in court indicating that Greenberg was going to be a witness in the trial, which starts Monday.) In January, Handberg’s team of local federal prosecutors secured a guilty plea from a tag-along to the alleged Gaetz-Greenberg underage sex trafficking: a former radio shock jock and Greenberg associate named “Big Joe” Ellicott. Ellicott revealed intimate knowledge of the sexual crimes in text messages exclusively obtained by The Daily Beast. He was also allegedly present at a pivotal moment when Greenberg phoned the congressman to let him know that one of the teens they’d allegedly paid for sex was underage, The Daily Beast previously reported. Weeks before that, Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend testified before the grand jury, reportedly under an immunity deal. The ex-girlfriend, considered a witness to possible obstruction charges against Gaetz, reportedly feared that the teen at the center of the probe had taped her in conversations with Gaetz and other women in Dec. 2020—around the time federal agents seized both her phone and the congressman’s. In Nov. 2021, two months before Gaetz’s ex testified, Handberg’s team indicted two Greenberg associates for fleecing an investor out of $12 million in a real estate fraud scheme, yet another example of the.many corruption cases bogging down investigators. Two high-ranking prosecutors at the Department of Justice’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.—Todd Gee and Lauren Britsch—have led the Gaetz portion of the investigation, according to sources who have interacted with them. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Orlando—Roger Handberg, Jennifer Harrington, and Amanda Daniels—continue to investigate local elements of overlapping crime rings. For some involved in the case as witnesses or potential targets of the larger sex trafficking investigation, it’s been months since they’ve heard from prosecutors. A Gaetz-Greenberg associate who was allegedly involved in drug-fueled sex parties has not heard from the federal grand jury in nearly a year, according to a person familiar with his situation. A key witness who knew about the underage sex trafficking and testified before that grand jury has been in the dark for months, according to another person familiar with her situation. “This is the most quiet this whole deal has been,” said one witness who first alerted the Secret Service to potential criminal behavior by the congressman. The calm is starting to frustrate more than a dozen witnesses and attorneys who represent people at odds with Gaetz or Greenberg, although most said they remain hopeful. “We know for a fact that there are dozens of other actors who were involved in drug-fueled sex parties with underage girls and other criminal financial schemes. If at the end of the day only two or three people are held to account by the feds, that would be a real miscarriage of justice and transparency,” said David Bear, an Orlando attorney who has advised several people who would consider themselves victims of Greenberg’s abuse of power while in office. In another signal of the investigation’s scope and progress, three sources told The Daily Beast that prosecutors turned their attention to Tallahassee this spring. According to the sources, this previously unreported action involved interviews with possible witnesses and subjects in connection to another spoke of the Gaetz case—an alleged public corruption scheme to influence marijuana policy, said to involve state officials. Gaetz is also reportedly part of that inquiry. There, federal prosecutors with the DOJ’s public integrity unit are reportedly examining whether a group of men provided gifts including marijuana and prostitutes during a 2018 trip to the Bahamas in exchange for political favors. Overall, the limited amount of public prosecutorial action has—after an explosive two months of headlines last year—left many outside observers curious, confused, and skeptical. Some, like Mark Lombardo, are annoyed. The Vietnam veteran and FedEx executive lost against Gaetz in the Republican primary on Tuesday. He told The Daily Beast that the sex trafficking investigation against the congressman “played a factor” in his decision to file campaign paperwork in June, and believes an indictment would have saved him a million dollars in campaign spending. “If you’re asking me whether I’m frustrated, of course I am,” Lombardo said. “I thought he’d be long gone… the wheels of justice don’t grind very fast.”
When Gaetz isn't molesting minors he's spreading bonkers horse manure. Matt Gaetz makes argument for electing Dems to block non-MAGA Republicans https://www.rawstory.com/matt-gaetz-maga-gop/ Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) this week argued that Republicans would benefit from winning fewer seats in the U.S. House of Representatives because some GOP candidates do not support former President Donald Trump's MAGA ideology. During an interview with conservative podcast host Charlie Kirk, Gaetz predicted that the Dobbs decision ending federal abortion rights would "definitely" result in fewer Republican seats in Congress. "The impact of the Dobbs decision in both of those cases may end up being good for the country," he opined. "Slim majorities are able to work more cohesively." Gaetz asserted that Republicans could pass a more radical agenda with fewer members. "I can't tell you, after Donald Trump drug all these people to victory on a bold MAGA agenda in 2016," he complained, "how many of them got here and said, 'Oh, well, I'm one of the majority makers so I have to be given a pass on this vote.'" "If we were to have like a six or seven-seat majority, well then everyone's a majority maker and then kind of in the same way no one is," he added. "And it becomes harder to swim away from the school. If you get a larger group, it is more subject to cleavages and factions in the caucus. If you have a very slim majority, it forces you to work as a team."
The one pedo asked the other pedo for a blanket pardon. Matt Gaetz sought 'pre-emptive' Trump pardon over DOJ sex-trafficking investigation: report Saturday afternoon the Washington Post reported that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) made an appeal to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to ask Donald Trump for a blanket pardon after learning he was the subject of a DOJ sex-trafficking investigation. The report states that in testimony given to the Jan. 6 House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol, former Trump adviser Johnny McEntee brought up Gaetz's appeal. According to the report, McEntee told investigators, "Gaetz told him during a brief meeting 'that they are launching an investigation into him or that there’s an investigation into him,' without specifying who was investigating Gaetz." The report adds that Gaetz was seeking Meadow's help. Gaetz told McEntee that he had asked White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for a pardon," the Post is reporting adding, "Asked by investigators if Gaetz’s ask for a pardon was in the context of the Justice Department investigation into whether Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws, McEntee replied, 'I think that was the context, yes,' according to people familiar with the testimony who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters."
Moral Panic Matt Gaetz Embodies the Evangelical Movement’s Skewed Obsession with Sex Trafficking by Cathy Reisenwitz Published on April 26, 2021 https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/matt-gaetz-scandal-evangelical-moral-panic U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz speaking with supporters at an “An Address to Young Americans” event, featuring President Donald Trump in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 23, 2020. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons) The Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently investigating Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for allegedly traveling across state lines with one or more women he paid for sex who may have been under 18 at the time. The DOJ has said these crimes may constitute sex trafficking, and that Gaetz, an outspoken evangelical Christian with theocratic leanings, might be facing charges that carry stiff prison penalties. “I was saved in a Baptist church during my teenage years,” Gaetz once said while running for office. “I am a member of First Baptist Church in Fort Walton Beach. The Bible, the Gospel—these are our instructions from God. We are to follow faithfully.” On sexual matters particularly, Gaetz’s views align with an evangelical purity culture that deems any sex act (or thought) outside of a lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous marriage irredeemably immoral. It’s somewhat ironic to see Gaetz caught up in his own culture’s favorite moral panic. Then again, it’s perhaps unsurprising, as many aspects of purity culture help enable sex abuse, exemplifying how evangelicals’ sex-trafficking hysteria distracts attention from far more common kinds of sexual abuse. While Gaetz may be among the latest high-profile evangelicals to be credibly accused of sexual impropriety, he’s hardly alone. The U.S. evangelical movement is currently reckoning with an onslaught of allegations. The Southern Baptist Church is dealing with a sex abuse scandal. A joint investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News in 2019 found a systemic pattern of documented abuse in Southern Baptist churches that spanned two decades and included at least 700 victims. Parents have also accused one of America’s largest Christian camps of employing a prominent spokesman who raped multiple children. Bill Gothard, head of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, is accused of sexually assaulting dozens of children. Multiple women have accused Ravi Zacharias, head of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, of rape. Multiple women have also claimed Illinois megachurch pastor Bill Hybels sexually assaulted and harassed them. Though evangelicals tend to oppose any sexual norm they believe might threaten the stability and fecundity of the Christian nuclear family—including premarital sex, interracial dating, gay marriage, trans rights, immigration, and abortion—the purity culture Gaetz and other evangelicals promote may actually exacerbate sexual abuse. A recent report from the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence found that certain norms embedded in religious teachings, in particular, are associated with high levels of sexual abuse; these include gender essentialism, limited autonomy for women, limited gender egalitarianism, a view of masculinity as dominant and aggressive, and male sexual entitlement. So while it might seem counterintuitive that sexual abuse allegations proliferate in a movement that emphasizes sexual restraint and propriety, evangelical purity culture shares troubling overlaps with other cultures in which sexual abuse is common. For example, evangelical purity culture stresses gender essentialism—patriarchal power structures in which women serve and obey men—and rigidly enforced gender roles. This reinforces a hierarchy in which men control women’s behavior, especially sexual behavior, while being absolved of responsibility for their own. At “purity balls,” prepubescent girls sign pledges to their fathers promising to abstain from sex until marriage; former child celebrities including Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, and the Jonas Brothers once inspired their young followers to wear “purity rings” to symbolize this form of commitment. Purity culture also teaches young people to feel ashamed of normal, healthy sexual impulses; and employs ritual demonstrations meant to warn young people away from sin by emphasizing the dangers of premarital sexual activity. Sex before marriage meant that “You would walk down the aisle fundamentally tarnished, having lost something you could never get back,” as conservative writer David French notes in a piece for The French Press. “In one particularly pernicious ritual, youth pastors would show Christian teenagers two pennies, one brand new and others that had been in circulation. The brand new penny was ‘pure.’ The dirty pennies were ‘handled,’ and the more they were ‘handled,’ the dirtier they became.” Other churches demonstrate the danger by way of roses without petals or chewed gum; the leaders at my own youth-group abstinence camp used a piece of tape, teaching us that, like tape that loses its stickiness from use, sex before marriage weakens the eventual bond with our spouses. Purity culture and high-abuse cultures teach that men are constantly horny and can’t be trusted to control their sexual thoughts or actions, so young girls and women must protect men from lustful thoughts and temptation through saying no and hewing to ever-changing, inherently subjective, “modesty” requirements. After marriage, purity culture and high-abuse cultures both teach men to feel entitled to sex and teach women to feel responsible for satisfying their husband’s sexual desires. Since the beginning of the 21st century, a renewed right-wing evangelical movement has worked to whip up a moral panic around sex trafficking in the United States and abroad. Like most moral panics, this one has been spurred by fear, with the truth always coming out later. There’s no epidemic of sex trafficking that requires the federal government to censor online pornography or arrest, deport, or incarcerate Americans for buying or selling sex. Nevertheless, evangelicals have forged a vast network of organizations meant to “raise awareness” and lobby the U.S. government to use state violence to enforce sexual purity standards. Sold No More, for example, is the brainchild of evangelical activist Jerry Peyton, who previously supported crisis pregnancy centers and fought for abstinence-only sex education. Operation Underground Railroad receives support from the Mormon church. Shared Hope International, founded by former lawmakers with explicit religion-fueled right-wing agendas, helps write anti-trafficking policy. Yet most of these groups downplay their religious connections. The evangelical-founded National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), for instance, was known as Morality in Media before rebranding in 2015; Exodus Cry is an offshoot of an anti-gay group known as the International House of Prayer. To further obfuscate their origins, NCOSE and Exodus Cry created a new org, TraffickingHub. These groups share one explicitly stated goal: to further criminalize and stigmatize pornography and sex work to make them more punitive. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), NCOSE, and Shared Hope International lobby governments to use anti-trafficking laws to punish men who patronize adult, consensual sex workers. Alaska’s HB 359 recategorizes sex work and “promoting prostitution” as sex trafficking regardless of whether the accused engaged in force, fraud, or activity involving minors. But nearly every statistic they use in the service of “raising awareness” is misleading or inaccurate: They count every call to their tip hotline as a separate instance of actual sex trafficking even though one instance may result in multiple calls—and, more important, that many calls are unsubstantiated. These groups also count every instance of consensual adult sex work as sex trafficking because they deny that there’s a distinction. Republican lawmakers have falsely claimed that child sex trafficking is a $9 billion industry, while Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee claimed there are 79,000 sex trafficking victims in Texas alone. But the National Trafficking Hotline reported just 455 possible human trafficking calls in Texas in 2018. When they’re not pushing racist tropes to arrest women for giving “happy ending” massages, these groups are pushing to ban porn and reclassify all sexual expression as pornographic. They spread disinformation portraying legal porn sites like Pornhub as uniquely prolific and unrepentant purveyors of smut featuring minors and abuse. It’s odd that not a single organization aimed at raising awareness about sex trafficking, despite their million-dollar budgets, has ever run a credible study on how often sex trafficking occurs. Perhaps these organizations rely on anecdotes and flawed data year after year because it has always been vanishingly rare for a stranger to successfully kidnap someone in the United States and force them into sex slavery. The most cursory analysis reveals that nearly every case of “sex trafficking” turns out to be one of two things: It’s either actually adult, consensual sex work or it’s an instance of intimate-partner violence.The high-profile Asian massage parlor sting that netted billionaire Robert Kraft is a particularly egregious example: Despite media reports that called it a “sex trafficking” raid, police made no arrests for sex trafficking in that case; prosecutors, did charge four Asian women with prostitution and levied $30,000 in fines against them. The real sexual abuse epidemic is sex workers being raped by clients and then being raped by police when we try to report it. It’s boyfriends telling their girlfriends to have sex for money or they’ll break up with them. It’s congressional representatives like Gaetz showing nude photos of women without their consent to his colleagues on the House floor. Polaris, Exodus Cry, TraffickingHub, NCOSE, etc. have absolutely nothing to show when it comes to even measuring, much less reducing, human trafficking. While Matt Gaetz may be among the latest high-profile evangelicals to be credibly accused of sexual impropriety, he’s hardly alone. If these groups really wanted to end sex trafficking and protect women in the sex trade they’d support fully decriminalizing sex work. Every credible human-rights organization, including Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, the World Health Organization, and the Lancet agrees that decriminalization reduces human trafficking, improves public health, and creates safer working conditions for sex workers. Yet none of these groups support this initiative. If Gaetz did in fact pay a 17-year-old for sex, that is certainly icky, if not illegal. The fact that the DOJ and major media outlets describe this as sex trafficking speaks to the influence of evangelical lobbying; pushing sex trafficking as a pervasive threat redirects attention away from the very real abuse perpetrated within and by evangelical purity culture by creating a moral panic around a hugely exaggerated threat of sex trafficking. By disempowering women, encouraging male sexual entitlement, and eschewing accountability mechanisms, evangelical purity culture creates the perfect environment for male leaders to abuse their women followers. Sex workers are simply collateral damage in the war against sex they don’t like. This helps explain why the mass shooting in March that killed eight people, including six Asian women, at two Atlanta-area massage parlors, hit home for many people raised with evangelical rhetoric. The shooter, who was heavily involved in the Southern Baptist Church, told Atlanta police that he had a sex addiction and sought to remove the “temptation” he saw in massage parlors. “When many Christian women (and women who’d left the church) heard the killer’s motive, they thought, ‘That’s an extreme version of an idea that I was taught for years—that men need to protect themselves from women, from me,’” French wrote. It’s a reminder that the vast majority of violence against women in America isn’t new: Instead, what there is today, what there has always been in America, is an unrelenting culture of rigid gender hierarchy and sexual shame that leads to sexual violence and a series of sexual moral panics—promoted with lies and enforced through state violence—created to protect the stability and fecundity of the nuclear Christian white nationalist family. The real sexual abuse epidemic isn’t men in vans holding women at gunpoint. It’s the men in our homes, our churches, our schools, and our workplaces. It’s men like Gaetz, and the ideologies of abuse that they promote.