In a new press release, the House Ethics Committee confirms that it has issued more than two dozen subpoenas so far in the course of investigating prominent Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).
“Representative Gaetz has categorically denied all of the allegations before the Committee. Notwithstanding the difficulty in obtaining relevant information from Representative Gaetz and others, the Committee has spoken with more than a dozen witnesses, issued 25 subpoenas, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents in this matter,” they said.
The committee shared these details in the context of publicly describing that it would be continuing an investigation of Gaetz. The Ethics Committee first began looking at the Congressman years ago, but it held off on further investigative work at the request of the federal Justice Department, which investigated the Congressman in a widely reported probe but ultimately didn’t charge him with anything.
The Ethics Committee has been gradually reforming its own investigation in the wake of the Justice Department’s choices, with the panel saying that the department rescinded its request for them to defer their investigation of Gaetz.
Leaving some of their earlier threads behind, the Ethics Committee outlined four continued areas of concerning allegations as their investigation moves forward, including possible sexual misconduct and that the Republican may have “sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.”
Gaetz has sometimes been substantially at odds with his fellow Republicans, having led the charge late last year to oust then-Speaker of the House Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from that legislative leadership role, plunging the legislative chamber into weeks of procedural paralysis as Republicans struggled with the process of replacing McCarthy, who subsequently left Congress altogether. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) later threatened Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), McCarthy’s successor, with a similar move, which failed.
