Rep. Matt Gaetz arrives during the second day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum, July 16, in Milwaukee. If he becomes attorney-general, Mr. Gaetz would be in the unusual position of running a department that once investigated him.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
Donald Trump has tapped Matt Gaetz as his attorney-general, seeking to install a man once investigated for alleged sex trafficking as the U.S.’s top justice official. And he has named Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, giving oversight of the country’s spy agencies to a woman who has blamed American policies for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Wednesday afternoon announcements, made after the president-elect wrapped up a visit to the White House to meet with President Joe Biden for the first time since his victory last week, continue his rapid-fire rollout of controversial loyalists for top positions in his administration. Mr. Trump also met with the Republican House of Representatives caucus, which gave him a standing ovation.
As ballot counting continued Wednesday evening, the party clinched control of the chamber, giving Mr. Trump a governing trifecta in Washington that will ease the passage of some of his campaign promises.
Mr. Gaetz, a 42-year-old member of Congress from Florida, would hold one of the most important roles in the new government. Mr. Trump promised during the campaign to launch prosecutions of political opponents, judicial officials and corporations, and to purge those who had investigated him.
The Department of Justice will also have to defend the new president’s signature policies – from mass deportations to a plan to replace civil servants with political appointees – from expected legal challenges. Mr. Gaetz resigned his Pensacola-based seat shortly after Mr. Trump announced his nomination.
Ms. Gabbard, 43, is a former Democratic representative from Hawaii who ran a long-shot campaign for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020. A long-time isolationist, she has opposed the U.S. helping Ukraine and has repeatedly been accused by lawmakers of both parties of harbouring sympathies for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
She would be taking oversight of the country’s espionage apparatus at a time when the U.S. is locked in conflict with Russia and has accused Mr. Putin’s intelligence agencies of interfering in U.S. elections.
Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Gabbard, along with the rest of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, must be confirmed by the Senate. While the Republicans won a 53 to 47 majority in the body last week, it is unclear whether they will agree to two such surprise choices.
Mr. Gaetz has antagonized fellow Republican legislators, including by gridlocking the House last year with his overthrow of then-speaker Kevin McCarthy. Ms. Gabbard’s history, meanwhile, is certain to set off alarm bells for traditional national-security-minded Republicans.
Republican Senators on Wednesday chose John Thune of South Dakota as their caucus’s new leader, replacing Mitch McConnell. A 19-year veteran of the chamber, Mr. Thune turned away a challenge from Rick Scott of Florida, who ran as a more MAGA-aligned candidate but garnered only 13 votes.
In a statement, Mr. Trump said Mr. Gaetz would “end Weaponized Government” and “root out the systemic corruption at DOJ.”
The president-elect has threatened to use the justice system to take revenge against Democratic politicians, including Mr. Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, as well as all of the people who worked on the four criminal cases against him, including special counsel Jack Smith. Mr. Trump has also called for the prosecution of Google for carrying negative stories about him.
If he becomes attorney-general, Mr. Gaetz would be in the unusual position of running a department that once investigated him. The federal probe looked into allegations that Mr. Gaetz paid a 17-year-old girl for sex as part of a sex-trafficking scheme to which one of his friends, an Orlando-area tax collector named Joel Greenberg, pleaded guilty in 2021.
Mr. Gaetz denied paying for sex. He told Axios at the time that he had “provided for women I’ve dated” by covering their flights and hotel rooms. Last year, his lawyers said the Department of Justice had told Mr. Gaetz that it was closing its investigation of him without laying charges. He was still the subject of a probe by the House’s oversight committee, which he will now avoid by quitting his seat.
Ms. Gabbard spent eight years in the House of Representatives, during which her politics veered across the political spectrum from opposing same-sex marriage to endorsing self-described socialist Bernie Sanders for president in 2016. Ms. Gabbard’s own run four years later ended with less than a percentage point worth of votes. She endorsed Mr. Biden before leaving the Democratic Party two years later.
One constant through her career has been opposition to the U.S.’s involvement in foreign wars. In 2017, she met with Mr. al-Assad, and later said she was “skeptical” he had used chemical weapons on his own people, contrary to the conclusion of the U.S. government. In 2019, she said Mr. al-Assad was “not the enemy of the United States.”
When Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, she defended him. “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO,” she tweeted the week the invasion began.
She also posted a video propagating the “biolabs” conspiracy theory, a groundless, Russian-promoted claim that the U.S. was maintaining secret biological weapons labs in Ukraine.
In addition to Washington’s antagonism with Moscow over Ukraine, U.S. intelligence has long accused Mr. Putin’s regime of interfering in American elections. During the campaign, Mr. Trump also promised purges to “clean out all the corrupt actors in our national-security and intelligence apparatus.”
During Mr. Trump’s first presidential term, he clashed with some of his own cabinet members who held internationalist or interventionist views that did not align with his, including secretary of defence James Mattis and national-security adviser John Bolton.
This time, he is exclusively picking loyalists, in many cases sacrificing experience for ideological congruence.
In addition to Mr. Gaetz and Ms. Gabbard, earlier this week he tapped a Fox News host, Pete Hegseth, to serve as secretary of defence. Mr. Hegseth, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, has suggested that women shouldn’t serve in military combat roles and that the U.S. should consider ignoring the Geneva Conventions against war crimes.
Mr. Trump has, however, made some more conventional choices, including confirming Wednesday that he would nominate Florida Senator Marco Rubio, an experienced foreign-policy hand, as secretary of state.
By late Wednesday, the Republicans had carried 218 seats in the House, a one-seat majority, with nine seats still too close to call. Four of these were in California, whose rules on mail-in voting mean the state often takes weeks to finish counting ballots.
Winning full control of Congress, even narrowly, gives Mr. Trump a shot at passing promised tax cuts and potentially funding his mostly unfinished wall on the Mexican border. But it will likely entail a continuation of the drama that plagued the House for the past two years, as a small number of Republicans, including Mr. Gaetz, held up their own party’s efforts to pass legislation.
Mr. Trump is also narrowing at least temporarily the Republicans’ margin by picking Mr. Gaetz and at least two other representatives, Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz, for administration jobs.
The president-elect on Wednesday met with the caucus before heading to the White House for a two-hour sit-down with Mr. Biden. Both men promised a “smooth” transition of power.
“Politics is tough. And it’s, in many cases, not a very nice world,” Mr. Trump said at the start of the meeting. “But it is a nice world today.”
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump officially announced on Nov. 13 he is nominating Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a senior member of both the foreign relations and intelligence committees and former political rival, to be secretary of state.
Reuters