When The Allegations Beat You

Matt Gaetz consciously decoupled from Donald Trump earlier on Thursday when he took himself out of consideration for attorney general.

It came after four senators reportedly said that they would not vote to confirm him, all prompted by the miasma of a particularly degenerate sex scandal involving Gaetz and, allegedly, a minor. It is fitting and proper that he should withdraw from consideration.

But there were other issues around the Gaetz nomination that were largely overlooked by the mainstream media in the frenzy around the graphic allegations of sexual misconduct and a House Ethics Committee investigation into the particulars.

I’ve been researching Gaetz’s ties to the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist organization that played a leading role in the assault on the Capitol on January 6. The Proud Boys have come close to acting as Trump’s personal street fighters; during a 2020 debate against Joe Biden, Trump told them to “stand back and stand by.” Gaetz used the same phrase this year while visiting Trump at his hush money trial in Manhattan.

The ties go deeper than that.

Back in November 2018, Gaetz appeared at a rally in Broward County, Florida. It was right after the midterm elections, where both a Senate seat and the race for governor in the state were hotly contested. Broward County was conducting a recount.

Right-wing activists descended on a local elections office to stage protests. Gaetz, then a Florida congressman entering his second term, appeared at the protest, where several Proud Boys also appeared.

At one point, Gaetz gave a speech from what seemed to be the back of a container truck. It’s a fascinating artifact, like a prototype of the 2020 election overthrow attempt: Gaetz eggs the crowd on against election workers, telling them that dead people’s votes were cast, that the election was a sham, and that audits needed to be conducted to determine the true total. The Miami New Times reported that Gaetz was photographed alongside a Proud Boy at the event. Per the New York Times, federal prosecutors examined the rally as a potential “model” for January 6.

The person who took a video of Gaetz at the event is also purportedly a Proud Boy.

After the Capitol insurrection, Gaetz traveled with other far-right members of Congress to a D.C. jail holding January 6 defendants. Enrique Tarrio, the then-free Proud Boys leader, wrote on Telegram in March of that year that Gaetz had a “brass set” after he pushed back on efforts to combat extremism in the military.

These details were mostly overlooked in the the past week. And, now that Gaetz is out of consideration, we likely won’t hear much more about it. But it’s telling that Trump’s first pick for attorney general was friendly with members of the group committed to overthrowing the government on January 6 to save Trump politically.

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