Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters answered questions about the US election and what it will mean for New Zealand's relationship with the United States. Video / Mark Mitchell
Matt Gaetz has been appointed attorney general by President-elect Donald Trump, despite facing multiple investigations.
Gaetz, who denies any wrongdoing, was previously investigated for sex trafficking and other serious allegations.
The appointment has raised eyebrows among both the Republican and Democrat establishments.
Videos Matt Gaetz is alleged to have shown colleagues were not the sort of thing usually associated with the staid halls of the US Congress.
One allegedly shown by the Florida congressman featured a young woman hula-hooping. Other images are alleged to have shown women he claimed to have slept with.
At other times, Gaetz was accused of boasting of his sexual escapades.
Donald Trump picks Matt Gaetz to lead the Justice Department. Photo / AFP
Markwayne Mullin, a fellow Republican and senator for Oklahoma, said last year: “We all saw videos he was showing on the House floor, that all of us had walked away, of girls that he had slept with”.
“He would brag about how he would crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink, so he could go all night.”
Gaetz denied the claim, saying he had barely spoken “20 words” to Mullin.
Gaetz’s conduct, which was investigated by the House ethics committee, is now under renewed scrutiny after he was a surprise pick as attorney general, one of the top positions in Donald Trump’s new administration.
The US President-elect has made his most controversial Government appointment yet, by picking the firebrand loyalist, who has faced investigation over a string of serious and lurid accusations, to be the country’s chief law enforcement officer.
Gaetz was until last year embroiled in a sex trafficking investigation by the very same Department of Justice (DOJ) he is now tipped to lead, over allegations he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl in exchange for money.
In 2021, it was disclosed federal investigators were looking into allegations he and one-time political ally Joel Greenberg paid underage girls and escorts or offered them gifts in exchange for sex.
Gaetz strongly denied any wrongdoing and said he was the victim of a politically motivated “fishing expedition”, because he was an “outspoken conservative”.
He also said the sex crimes investigation was part of an “organised criminal extortion” against him.
Last year, the DOJ told Gaetz it was ending the investigation without charging him.
In 2021, the House Ethics Committee opened its own investigation into some of the same allegations, as well as accusations Gaetz had misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, wrongly accepted gifts, and shared inappropriate images or videos.
He again denied any wrongdoing and said he was the victim of a smear.
The committee later dropped some strings of the investigation, including on sharing of videos, but had been due to release a highly critical report into Gaetz on Friday, according to reports.
Gaetz however resigned from his House seat late on Wednesday, effectively ending the investigation and putting him beyond the reach of the committee.
It was not immediately clear if the committee would still release its findings.
US President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump met in the White House earlier this week. Photo /Getty Images
Trump’s choice of Gaetz, if he is confirmed, would make the 42-year-old a key figure in the new administration, and put him in the hot seat for some of its highest political priorities.
He would oversee everything from the FBI to prisons, and make him the point man for overhauling a DOJ Trump claims was weaponised against him and other conservatives.
The new attorney-general is expected to oversee radical changes to the department, which has been in Trump’s crosshairs after cases accusing him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, estate.
In a statement posted on X, Trump said: “Matt will root out the systemic corruption at DOJ, and return the department to its true mission of fighting crime and upholding our democracy and constitution”.
“We must have honesty, integrity, and transparency at the DOJ.”
Hours before the announcement, Gaetz set out his own agenda, threatening to disband several of the law enforcement agencies he could oversee.
He said there needed to be a “full-court press against this weaponised Government that has been turned against our people”.
Gaetz added: “And if that means abolishing every one of the three-letter agencies, from the FBI to the ATF, I’m ready to get going!”
The choice of Gaetz was widely seen as a reward for his fierce loyalty to Trump but raised eyebrows among both the Republican and Democrat establishments.
Lisa Murkowski, Republican senator from Alaska, did not believe he was a serious candidate.
Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said Gaetz “would be a disaster”, in part because of Trump’s threat to use the DOJ “to seek revenge on his political enemies”.
Another Democrat called him “a gonzo agent of chaos”.
Gaetz, a former lawyer, joined Congress in 2016 and has since earned a reputation as one of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers. His fiery, combative approach has earned him enemies on both sides of the House.
Gaetz was born to a wealthy family in the Florida Panhandle that he now represents in Congress. Classmates remember him as being devoted to the school debating team.
According to a lengthy profile in the Atlantic magazine earlier this year, while at university, he would offer friends advice on how to act if they were ever pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving. His advice was to refuse a breathalyser and down a beer in front of the officer to make it more difficult to tell if they had been drinking earlier in the night.
“Most of us grew out of it. He made a career of it,” one friend recalled.
A spokesman for Gaetz said the profile contained “verifiable errors and laundered rumours”.
Later, Gaetz reportedly had to take his own advice when he was arrested on charges of drunk driving after leaving a nightclub. Prosecutors dropped the charges.
As he began his political career, he was allegedly in a circle of young Republican politicians who competed to earn points for sleeping with women. Sleeping with a lobbyist scored one point, a fellow legislator scored three, and a married fellow legislator scored six.
Gaetz has denied knowledge of the game, or taking part.
In 2015, as he prepared to run for Congress, he announced he would throw his support behind Trump and became his fierce defender.
As Gaetz’s profile grew, soon the newly elected Trump was calling him for advice, he wrote in his autobiography. Gaetz claimed in the book that he once even took a call from Trump while “in the throes of passion”.
In a resurfaced video now being widely shared, Gaetz called pro-abortion protesters “disgusting” and claimed they were too unattractive to be impregnated.
“These pro-abortion, pro-murder rallies? The people are just disgusting,” he told a crowd at a right-wing student conference in Florida in July 2022.
The Florida congressman, who has repeatedly voted against acts to protect access to abortion and contraception, continued: “Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions?
“No one wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”
He later doubled down on the remarks, widely deemed misogynistic, saying in a separate interview that those at pro-abortion rallies are “ugly on the inside and out and I make no apology for it”.
In 2018, he faced criticism for bringing a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union and later tried to expel two fathers who lost children in a mass shooting from a hearing after they objected to a claim he made about gun control.
