An alleged orgy with prostitutes. Accusations of sex with a minor girl. A photo of the trophy of a woman wearing only a hula hoop. And a complicated extortion plot involving a likely American hostage killed in Iran.
Even by Florida standards, the Matt Gaetz saga is downright weird and getting weirder every day.
Earlier this week, the young Sunshine State congressman and ally of former President Donald Trump was best known, as his mentor, for his ambitious conservatism and promontory hairstyle.
But this week, the Republican has faced a daily downpour of outrageous headlines.
Worst of all, the Justice Department is investigating him for allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old girl and for paying her to travel with him through state lines, which could violate federal sex trafficking laws.
Gaetz denies the allegations, but not the fact of the investigation.
Then, on Thursday, CNN alleged that it had shown other lawmakers nude photos of women it said it had slept with, including a photograph with a hula hoop, and nothing else.
There have also been claims by two of Gaetz’s enemies that the FBI has photos of him in a “sexual orgy with underage prostitutes.”
It’s enough to prove his love of Instagram without pants, as he did in a July post entitled: “Work Covid!” they seem tame by comparison.
This has been Gaetz’s latest drama so far:
News of the sex trafficking investigation, which began in the last months of the last administration, appeared Tuesday in The New York Times.
Pensacola’s 38-year-old bachelor – Harvard business school student Ginger Luckey, 26, was announced on Twitter by Fox’s Jeanine Pirro in December – immediately denied that he had having sex with a minor or transporting him or her through state lines.
“In the strongest possible terms. I deny that I have ever been with a minor, “he told The Post on Tuesday.
“This is false,” he insisted.
But Gaetz had only raised more eyebrows when he conceded to the Times that part of his past “generosity” toward old friends might perhaps haunt him again.
“I just know it has to do with women,” he told the newspaper when asked what he knew about the investigation.
“I suspect someone is trying to recategorize my generosity towards ex-girlfriends as something more unfavorable.”
Soon, a new barrage of headlines – involving victims of underage sex trafficking, an orgy and a $ 25 million extortion plot – demonstrated what the most unfavorable things could achieve.
A few hours after the Times story, Gaetz did an interview on Fox News with Tucker Carlson.
He was there on camera, apparently, to clear things up.
Instead, Gaetz weaved a twisted tale that turned him and his father, Don, a wealthy Florida politician, into the heroic victims of a massive blackmail plot.
“What’s happening,” he told Carlson of the DOJ’s leak to the Times, “is an extortion of my family and me, involving a former Justice Department official.”
That former officer, the villain of his alleged extortion plot, is attorney David McGee, a former Florida federal prosecutor, according to Gaetz.
“On March 16, my father received a text message requesting a meeting,” Gaetz said. “Where one person demanded $ 25 million in exchange for making horrible sex trafficking allegations against me,” he told Carlson.
He and his father contacted the feds, “and the FBI and the Department of Justice were so concerned about this attempted extortion of a member of Congress that they asked my father to carry a cable,” Gaetz said. and Carlson.
The feds must release the resulting audio tape, he told Carlson, claiming it will prove his innocence and reveal “a plot to bleed my family out of the money.”
McGee leaked the DOJ’s sexual trafficking investigation to the Times when the extortion plot ended, Gaetz concluded in the shocking interview.
Then there is the Iranian hostage angle.
McGee and former Air Force intelligence officer Bob Kent did not want the money for them, necessarily, Gaetz alleges.
They wanted to use the money to free Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent taken hostage by Iran in 2007, and declared dead by his family last year.
Oh, what about these allegations of sex trafficking?
“Offering flights and hotel rooms to people with whom you go out at an older age is not a crime,” Gaetz told Carlson, a denial he may have done less in the way of clearing his name than he intended.
McGee, meanwhile, has denied allegations of hostage-taking conspiracy by Gaetz, calling them a “blatant attempt to distract from the fact that he is being investigated for child sex trafficking,” he told the Washington Post.
And McGee fights Gaetz with his own dirt.
Which leads us, finally, to the supposed orgy.
Gaetz has shown the Washington Examiner a series of text messages and other documents he says show details of McGee and Kent’s alleged attempted extortion, including the couple’s reference to the FBI that had photos of the congressman in a “sexual orgy. with underage prostitutes “.
The document has not been verified and its redundant reference to a “sexual orgy” is not elaborated.
Text messages appeared on Friday seeking to link Gaetz to Joel Greenberg, a political ally and tax official in Seminole County who is being prosecuted for underage sex trafficking.
It was Greenberg’s prosecution (for allegedly making a false identification of a underage girl “to facilitate her efforts to perform commercial sexual acts”) that had first put Gaetz on the federation’s radar.
The texts obtained by the Daily Beast seem to show Greenberg asking one of his workers to license his driver’s license for Gaetz, who had lost his and needed a quick replacement to board a flight.
The congressman repeatedly praised unnamed Florida agents about the women he met through Greenberg, even throwing videos at parties of them at various stages of undressing, the Washington Post reported Friday in the night.
And to end the week off, his Florida communications director, Luke Ball, removed Gaetz’s mentions from his Twitter biography and submitted his resignation.
“Congressman Matt Gaetz’s office and Luke Ball have agreed that it would be best to separate,” a joint statement said. “We thank you for your time in our office and wish you all the best for moving forward.”