Johnson allies beg Trump to back him as speaker; Report airs Gaetz lurid allegations

Matt Gaetz shared a photograph of a printed-out article in The Federalist about the former congressman’s ethics probe.

“I got a great note from President Trump!” Gaetz shared Monday night, hours after the House Ethics Committee shared “substantial evidence” he paid tens of thousands of dollars for sex, including with a high school student, and frequently used cocaine and ecstasy while in office.

“Matt very unfair!” reads the note, drawn in Trump’s classic thick Sharpie print.

The article, however, is from November,

As a sitting member of Congress, Matt Gaetz paid for sex with a 17-year-old high school student, used cocaine and ecstasy, and spent thousands of dollars on sex- and drug-fueled partying, according to a bombshell report from the House Ethics Committee.

Monday’s report found “substantial evidence” the now-former Republican congressman “regularly” paid for sex and met women through a “sugar dating” website through a former associate who has since pleaded guilty to sex trafficking.

We combed through the report.

The House Ethics Committee report into Matt Gaetz states that “all of the women interviewed by the committee said their sexual relationship with Gaetz was consensual, but at least one woman said the use of drugs at the parties they attended with him may have ‘impair[ed their] ability to really know what was going on or fully consent.’”

“Indeed, nearly every woman that the Committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption,” according to the report.

Gaetz has rejected the allegations.

Should other contenders for the speakership emerge with any significant support following last week’s spending bill battle it could delay the certification of the president-elect’s own victory.

So far, there has been silence on the matter from Mar-a-Lago since Friday night’s vote on a continuing resolution to fund the federal government through mid-March — a struggle that did not bode well for Johnson’s future.

Oliver O’Connell reports.

President-elect Donald Trump is considering attempting to boot Speaker Mike Johnson from his post, according to Politico.

This comes after Congress narrowly averted a government shutdown on Friday night.

Trump is reportedly unhappy with the funding deal and that he didn’t get the debt ceiling hike he sought.

“The president is upset — he wanted the debt ceiling dealt with,” a person in Trump’s circle told the outlet.

“In the past couple weeks, we’ve questioned whether [Johnson has] been an honest broker,” another person said.

“I don’t see how Johnson survives,” yet another individual told Politico.

“No, he’s not taking the presidency,” Trump declared in a Sunday night speech. “That’s not happening.”

The president-elect’s snarky remark comes as Democrats have sought to drive a wedge between the world’s richest man and the notoriously thin-skinned Trump by highlighting Musk’s growing influence and describing him as the “real president.” The taunts have only grown following last week’s chaos on Capitol Hill after Musk raged against House Republicans’ original spending bill, prompting lawmakers to race against the clock to strike another deal to prevent the government from shutting down.

The chair of the Ethics Committee, Republican Rep. Michael Guest said that while he does “not challenge the Committee’s findings,” he did not vote to release the report.

Thirty-seven people on death row had their sentences commutated by President Joe Biden on Monday morning and will now serve life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, rather than face execution.

Maintaining the tradition of offering clemency in the last few weeks of a presidency, Biden exercised his power to remove most inmates from federal death row. Only three people will remain.

It comes a little less than a month before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Unlike Biden, Trump supports the death penalty and has suggested more people should be given death sentences – though he has not offered specifics on that. Trump restarted federal executions after a 17-year pause during his first term, with 13 being carried out.

The leader of Greenland has flat-out rejected President-elect Donald Trump’s renewed interest in purchasing the massive Arctic island from Denmark, insisting that the territory is not on the market.

“Greenland is ours,” Greenland Prime Minister Múte Egede said in a statement on Monday. “We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”

Egede’s comment comes after the incoming president announced that he wanted to revisit the idea of buying the semi-autonomous land from Denmark. During his first term in the White House, Trump expressed a desire to make a “large real estate deal” because “strategically” it would be “very nice.”