Gaetz never took Mueller seriously. It's showing.
Opinion: Matt Gaetz said the Mueller Investigation was based on "made up" stories. He should have paid closer attention.
On March 6, former convicted felon, Trump operative and self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone appeared on the Russian propaganda network Russia Today to discuss a “smear campaign” by mainstream media tying him to extremist groups that participated in the insurrection. Later in the interview, Stone said that if Trump decides not to run for president again, then MAGA fans will need a backup candidate who can credibly run the same “America First” platform in 2024. During a moment that felt almost certainly pre-planned, the host theatrically asked Stone to give one name that came to mind which fit the bill Stone described. Stone did not miss a beat: “Congressman Matt Gaetz from Florida.”
Stone went on to repeat this shtick several times in other interviews, extravagantly characterizing Gaetz as a John F. Kennedy-type for the conservative movement and the only candidate ready to take up the MAGA mantle. In light of Stone’s personal relationship with Gaetz and the revelation Gaetz has been under criminal investigation since last summer, these comments—which came just prior to news about the criminal probe becoming public—look more like an attempt to build a narrative that prosecutors were unfairly targeting Trump’s ostensible successor rather than a genuine belief Gaetz should be the de facto heir to the MAGA movement. Stone’s influence over Gaetz is apparent: his penchant for going on offense, not heeding the advice of lawyers to remain silent, confusing your opponents about the facts and turning the tables on investigators are all tactics Gaetz has employed in response to a growing scandal that threatens to swamp his political career. But these lessons do not seem to be serving Gaetz well, probably because he should have been learning from Stone’s least favorite opponent instead: the Mueller Investigation team.
The last few weeks have been a dizzying whirlwind of revelations about Gaetz and potential criminal exposure he faces from a Florida-based federal investigation of the former Seminole County Tax Collector, Joel Greenberg. Greenberg faces 33 charges, including harassment, stalking, aggravated identity theft, human trafficking of a minor, wire fraud, bribery, and other financial crimes. In February, this writer heard murmurs from sources in Florida that multiple witnesses had talked to federal investigators about seeing Gaetz on camera with Greenberg in the Seminole County tax collector office handling driver licenses during weekend hours. Greenberg stands accused of stealing and altering licenses surrendered at the office to create fake ID’s for himself and others, in part to further a human trafficking offense. Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that tidbit in addition to the news that federal investigators are focused on an alleged past relationship between Gaetz and a 17-year-old minor.
Then, the dam broke: stories by CBS News, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, and a host of other major outlets reported pieces of the bigger puzzle federal investigators are cobbling together. They cover a wide range of possibly unlawful conduct by Greenberg, Gaetz, and other unknown Republican officials, operatives, and donors in Florida. The subjects include an alleged trip to the Bahamas with paid escorts; alleged discussions with a prominent Republican lobbyist about planting a candidate to siphon votes in a Florida State Senate election; apparent Venmo payments from Gaetz to Greenberg, then Greenberg to young women, along with some $300,000 in suspicious payments on a Seminole County credit card by Greenberg. The latest blow to Gaetz came Thursday: Greenberg’s lawyer, Fritz Schiller, confirmed he is negotiating a guilty plea with prosecutors. It’s unclear if it is a simple plea deal to avoid trial, or one involving a formal cooperation agreement. But Schiller suggested the latter is on the table: “I am sure Matt Gaetz is not feeling very comfortable today,” he said outside the courthouse.
Even for Gaetz, who actively chose again and again to tie himself to the most scandal-ridden president in U.S. history, the pace with which this imbroglio has escalated into a full-scale crisis is astonishing. In just a few short weeks, the story has metastasized from an unconfirmed rumor mixed with a confusing claim about a possible extortion attempt into on-the-record comments that Gaetz should be scared by a lawyer for a potential co-conspirator in front of a court of law. It harkens back to another investigation that moved from rumor to indictment with head-spinning alacrity: the Mueller investigation. After working quietly through the summer and fall of 2017, the first whispers that Mueller had zeroed in on Michael Flynn emerged on NBC News in November of that year. Just weeks later, on December 1, Flynn pled guilty and agreed to cooperate. Mueller went on to obtain convictions or guilty pleas from Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen and a host of others, as well as critical evidence from Flynn demonstrating President Trump’s obstruction of justice in the White House.
Gaetz ignored much of those (and pretty much all other) facts about the Mueller investigation. Instead of parsing through the evidence that Mueller and his team documented in their lengthy report, he accused Mueller of hiring “biased” investigators to “stop Trump.” In the same tirade, he tied the Mueller investigation to the Steele Dossier and claimed Mueller was guilty of malpractice for not investigating its background. Mueller correctly noted that the issue of the Steele Dossier was under investigation by other divisions at the Department of Justice (first it was DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and later—after Horowitz found nothing wrong with the origins of the investigation—it became Special Counsel John Durham).
Gaetz went on to claim that Christopher Steele “made this whole thing up” to describe the entire Mueller Report. He ignored that Steele had certainly not “made up” the jury convictions of Trump Campaign chairman Paul Manafort for a variety of financial crimes related to his work for pro-Russian political parties, of Roger Stone for lying to Congress about his communications with Wikileaks, which released emails hacked by Russia, of Michael Flynn for lying to investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, and half of the Mueller Report which documented 140+ contacts between the Trump Campaign and Russia, backed up by evidence.
Gaetz’s staggering ignorance of the facts regarding the Mueller investigation are finally showing now, embodied in his mishandling of his own investigative crisis. By ignoring Greenberg’s case for nearly a year and not taking any steps to publicly explain their relationship, Gaetz allowed a cascade of revelations to pack a bigger punch than they might have if he had gotten out in front of them. Instead, stories have dropped like bombs every other day with new tawdry details that further incriminate Gaetz in Greenberg’s alleged criminal conduct. Gaetz’s crisis response has careened from a disastrous interview on Tucker Carlson to trotting out unsigned statements of support from women in his office—just as his senior staffers begin to resign. Similar to Manafort, Stone, and Flynn, who ignored the circling of investigators until it was far too late to escape culpability, resignation, and career implosion, Gaetz failed to get out in front of the investigation in favor of pretending that it simply did not exist. It’s not to say that addressing his relationship with Greenberg would have helped him avoid charges (only abstaining from criminal conduct could have done that) but it might have reduced the political impact of this story across front pages around the country.
Anyone who has closely watched the Greenberg case unfold knows that federal law enforcement has been pursuing this investigation for about two years. Known facts about the investigation suggest Greenberg was under scrutiny before he even committed the crime that led to his first indictment. Some close to the case speculated prosecutors were hoping to convince Greenberg to cooperate when they indicted him for harassment and stalking of his Republican primary opponent Brian Beute last June; just weeks later, they added a human trafficking charge and multiple counts of identity theft to the indictment, a classic tactic to increase pressure on Greenberg to strike a deal. But Greenberg did not flip and was released on bail.
In late February, Greenberg violated conditions of his release during an incident at his in-laws’ house. Police were called, and while Greenberg wasn’t charged with anything, days later he was remanded to custody (where he remains). Still, no formal indication of cooperation emerged. Then, just last week, a third superseding indictment was filed. It charged Greenberg with embezzling $400,000 from Seminole County taxpayers to fund personal cryptocurrency schemes and trying to bribe a federal official for a CARES Act loan, amongst other crimes.
If you’re just getting acquainted with the former tax collector from Seminole County, Florida, now is the time to go back and read the excellent local coverage of his tenure (mainly by the Orlando Sentinel). The Sentinel reported that Greenberg awarded $3.5 million in government contracts to friends and family, and more bizarrely that Greenberg was accused of soliciting a ransomware attack on the Seminole County Commissioner’s office by an IT contractor, with whom he allegedly offered to split the attack’s proceeds (reportedly $500,000 in Bitcoin). Greenberg also had inexplicable ties to political players like Roger Stone, who on a recent podcast acknowledged he knew Greenberg and defended their relationship by claiming that he knows “many tax collectors” across Florida. If Greenberg does end up cooperating with prosecutors, there’s certainly a lot for them to talk about.
What’s notable is that all these public reports about Greenberg’s alleged misconduct are several years old. The federal investigation itself into Greenberg is more than a year old. Why was Gaetz so dramatically unprepared to handle this crisis? Surely there are limitations to how much he could have done to mitigate the damage, but the way he handled this has been all wrong from the moment he sat down for what should have been a friendly, home-team interview with Tucker Carlson.
Perhaps Gaetz would have been better prepared for the rapid pace of these developments if he had paid closer attention to the facts of the Mueller investigation instead of perpetuating falsehoods about its origins. If he had understood the nuances the Mueller probe revealed, Gaetz would have picked up three key conclusions applicable to his own criminal exposure.
First, federal prosecutors do not bring cases they cannot win. There were no “not guilty” verdicts in the Mueller investigation. Even a juror who was an avid fan of Trump found Paul Manafort guilty on multiple charges. The moment Greenberg was charged with human trafficking, Gaetz should have recognized he was in serious trouble and gone public—not with lies, but with some dose of truthful acknowledgment that the two were at least close to reduce the explosiveness of that revelation coming from somewhere else. Despite many Twitter users pointing out last summer that Gaetz had endorsed Greenberg for Congress and taken photos with him before he was charged with human trafficking, Gaetz (for once, mistakenly) stayed completely silent. Keeping his involvement with Greenberg under wraps made the case ripe for media shockwaves, which in turn created bigger problems.
Second, Gaetz should know that for all the conjecture about witch hunts, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone would remain in jail if not for presidential intervention in each of their cases. Gaetz elected to live in a fictional world with people like Manafort, Stone, and Michael Flynn where—despite the evidence, the indictments, the testimony, and the jury verdicts—they were all wrongfully set up. He did not realize each man had the luxury of living in such a world because they could expect a pardon from a possible co-conspirator in their own crimes. President Biden is not granting Matt Gaetz or Joel Greenberg a pardon. Now, Gaetz is left desperate to live in the same fiction, with no passport to escape reality.
Third, Gaetz should have been prepared for his friend to flip, especially when his prosecution became front-page news. By focusing on the Steele Dossier and none of the facts revealed during the cooperation of Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, or Michael Cohen (because they tended to incriminate Donald Trump), Gaetz seems to have missed the lesson that unwanted media attention will often cause your friends to turn on you when they are under federal prosecution. Since Gaetz never addressed Greenberg’s prosecution, he allowed his own involvement in the case to turn into a ticking time bomb and was caught completely off-guard when it exploded publicly a few weeks ago. It now appears that explosion, and a few more charges, have caused Greenberg to flip. Gaetz is left with a front-page story about his own possible criminal exposure, as he spouts allegations of a witch hunt with no prospect of a pardon, and a close ally pushed closer to cooperating with prosecutors against him.
It’s clear Gaetz is adrift, and while it is perhaps not a shock that he’s involved in something suspect, it is surprising he wasn’t better prepared to do damage control on this crisis given his proximity to those who suffered similar maelstroms during the Mueller investigation. Gaetz’s lack of preparation for a crisis of his own suggests he truly deluded himself into believing Mueller’s charges were just the result of a witch hunt and untrue fabrications, even though the evidence always showed that was incorrect. This situation should serve as a stark warning to other MAGA Republicans who think they can do anything and simply employ the same tactics that Trump and his associates used to get out of trouble. If you can’t depend on a presidential pardon, the entire strategy pretty much falls apart.
By legitimately deluding himself into ignoring the facts, evidence, and jury convictions during the Mueller investigation, Gaetz focused on all the wrong things about an investigation he could have learned a great deal from. He may pay the price for that ignorance soon. Anyone with knowledge of the Greenberg case will tell you that federal prosecutors are looking to catch some bigger fish down in Florida.