The collective pearl-clutching by the corporate press and Washington establishment on Wednesday after Trump announced he’d chosen Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general was something to behold. The swamp consensus is that the former Florida congressman is “unqualified” to lead the Justice Department.
Never mind that the people making this claim are themselves deeply unqualified to hold their own positions of power. (Consider Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who dismissed Gaetz as not a “serious” pick. Murkowski is poster-child for unserious and unqualified Beltway drones. She failed the bar exam four times and only got a Senate seat because her corrupt father, Frank Murkowski, appointed her to his seat after he became a one-term governor of Alaska in 2002.)
But how exactly is Gaetz unqualified to lead the Justice Department? Put another way, what does Trump’s incoming attorney general need to be qualified to do?
Mostly, clean house at the DOJ. Going back at least to 2016, the Justice Department has been a viper’s nest of politically motivated prosecutions, sham investigations, coup-plotting, domestic spying and censorship, entrapment schemes, and the terrorization of law-abiding Americans. From illegally spying on Trump to the political persecution of Jan. 6 defendants, the DOJ has become a cancer on our body politic, and we need someone to go in and cut it out.
Above all, we need a Justice Department that will refrain from trying to undermine or remove the duly elected president. As Will Chamberlain noted on X, “The best way to understand the Gaetz pick is that it’s a statement by Trump that it’s not 2016 anymore and there will be no internal coup against the sitting President.”
What we don’t need, after the plots against Trump during his first term and four years of a totally weaponized DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland, is business as usual. We don’t need some career GOP prosecutor to be the “adult in the room” and “restrain Trump from his worst impulses.”
No, we need someone who knows firsthand how corrupt and compromised the Justice Department has become under Garland, and couldn’t care less what’s said about him at Georgetown cocktail parties or on MSNBC.
And since Gaetz himself was one of the more prominent victims of Garland’s politicized DOJ, he might just be the perfect person for the job. Beginning in March 2021, Gaetz was subjected to an 18-month sham DOJ investigation based on nothing more than the publication of an anonymously sourced and frankly outlandish report accusing him of possibly being a child sex trafficker.
He was never convicted and never even charged, but that was never the point. The point was to silence him. Prior to March 2021 Gaetz had been an effective and prominent voice in Congress pushing back against the Washington establishment’s worst impulses and abuses of power. He waged a public relations battle against Democrats and the deep state over the Russia collusion hoax, led a group of Republican congressmen protesting Rep. Adam Schiff’s sham Ukraine impeachment hearings, and raised concerns about Washington’s overreaction to the Jan. 6 riot and the politically motivated prosecutions of those involved. Gaetz frequently appeared on cable news to make his case, and he quickly became one of the most influential conservative congressmen.
But all that changed when Garland’s DOJ targeted him after a series of politically motivated leaks to The New York Times by anonymous DOJ lawyers. The Times dutifully published them, tarring Gaetz’s good name. As my colleague Mollie Hemingway wrote in 2022, the goal was to silence the colorful Florida congressmen by destroying his reputation: “Gaetz couldn’t very well critique the Department of Justice for their political prosecutions if he was a pariah who everyone thought was a pedophile.”
And that’s exactly what happened. The Democrat-run Ethics Committee in the House, which usually waits to launch investigations of sitting members of Congress until after the DOJ concludes its own investigation, immediately launched an ethics probe against Gaetz that was still ongoing when he announced his resignation from the House on Wednesday. Never Trump Republicans with an axe to grind, like then-Rep. Liz Cheney, reveled in the accusations against Gaetz and repeated them nearly as often as the corporate press did.
Eighteen months later, after the media had repeated the pedophile and sex trafficker accusations against Gaetz as often as they could, with Gaetz’s reputation and influence in tatters, the DOJ investigation was quietly dropped. Another anonymously sourced story, this time in The Washington Post, simply said senior career prosecutors recommended no charges.
That’s the kind of thing our Justice Department does now. Together with a corrupt and lawless FBI, it viciously attacks its critics through lies, leaks, and unrelenting lawfare. It gins up fake kidnapping plots like the one against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. It looks the other way when assassination plots and violent threats are leveled at Supreme Court justices. It illegally targets members of Congress. Anyone who threatens its power, including the former and soon-to-be president, is fair game.
The last thing Trump needs at DOJ is a Bill Barr-style careerist. The department is rotten to the core and a threat to the American people. Most of the careerists there need to be run out of the place—and then criminally investigated.
That means a willingness, determination, and courage to clean up and reform the Justice Department — or, barring that, dismantle it completely — are the only qualifications necessary to head Trump’s DOJ. So yes, Gaetz is more than qualified for the task at hand. In fact he’s probably just the man for the job.