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- February 11, 2024
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A chief witness and onetime friend of Representative Matt Gaetz is cooperating in an unfolding House Ethics Committee investigation into whether the Florida politician had sex with an underage girl while in Congress, a lawyer for the witness said Friday.
Fritz Scheller, who represents Joel Greenberg, said that he had provided documents to the committee and that Greenberg “has and will cooperate with any congressional request,” The New York Times reported.
In May of 2021, Greenberg pled guilty to several charges, including sex trafficking, and is currently in his second year of an 11-year sentence. The former Florida tax collector was able to secure a more lenient punishment by agreeing to cooperate with a Justice Department investigation into Gaetz. In February of 2023, the department announced that it was closing the investigation without charging the Florida Representative with any crimes.
At the time of Greenberg’s December 2022 sentencing, Scheller said he was “disappointed” that the department hadn’t charged anyone else, and, though he didn’t name Gaetz, urged prosecutors to “pursue others,” including more “higher-level” figures, CNN reported. When the DOJ ultimately declined to prosecute Gaetz, Scheller claimed that the move was evidence of “two systems of justice,” adding, “Why prosecute the privileged when defendants of limited culpability and means provide an easier target?”
A Gaetz spokeswoman, Jillian Wyant, said Friday that the material Greenberg has provided to the Ethics Committee is the same that was reviewed by the Justice Department, which “deemed it unreliable and declined to press charges.” Wyant added that the media “should not be laundering smears from people in prison.”
The House committee originally opened the investigation into whether Gaetz “may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift” in 2021, when Democrats controlled Congress.
But the ethics inquiry remained largely dormant until it was revived last year under GOP control.
The committee began reaching out to witnesses in July, but it appeared sidetracked by its investigation into disgraced former New York Representative George Santos. The committee asked to interview a witness soon after it released a bombshell report on Santos, signaling that it was beginning to turn its attention back to Gaetz. More recent reporting from CNN suggests that the inquiry is starting to look into possible sex crimes.
So far, Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing. In private communications reported by The Daily Beast in late January, he claimed that his push to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was driven by a desire to retaliate against the California Representative, whom Gaetz blamed for the ethics probe. On Friday, McCarthy told a media gaggle that the Florida congressman was afraid of the inquiry. “In the end, Gaetz would have a hard time being a member of Congress with staying out of jail too,” he said.
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