Transcript of Woman told House Ethics Committee she saw Gaetz have sex with a minor, lawyer says

Former Congressman Matt Gates, who just resigned his House seat days ahead of an Ethics Committee report involving sexual misconduct allegations against him. Tonight, the attorney who represents two women who were witnesses in the probe confirmed that one of his clients says she saw Gates having sex with a minor. Cnn has reached out to Gates for comment. The attorney said that both his clients sat for closed-door testimony before the committee. He's now calling on the committee to release the report, telling CNN, democracy demands transparency. Just one catch, House Speaker Mike Johnson wants to keep it under wraps, even though just yesterday, he said off camera that he would not be playing a part in the matter. But that was yesterday. This was today. I'm going to request I'm strongly requested the Ethics Committee not to hear the report because that is not the way to do things in the House. I think that would be a terrible precedent. So he's saying it would be a terrible precedent to release this report. He's a warning against it after a member steps down. But keeping them honest, the House Ethics Committee has done this before, most notably in a financial impropriety case for former Tennessee congressman Bill Boner, who left the House to become mayor of Nashville, and former Ohio congressman Donald Buzz-Lukens, who was convicted of having sex with a minor.

Now, in the former's case, the committee decided that the general policy of not releasing reports on former members was, quote, outweighed by the responsibility of the committee to fully inform the public. And that was for a would-be city mayor, not the highest-ranking law enforcement official on the land. Back now with our panel. David, how much do you think or do you think this witnesses testimony to the House Ethics Committee, according to her attorney, that she saw Gates have sex with a minor complicates what was already expected to be an uphold battle for Gates.

Well, look, I think that the Senate is going to demand to see that report. Senator Cornyn, a Republican, Republican, senior Republican, has said he wants to see the report. He said that today. I think others will join him. It's going to be really hard to explain to the American people why the senators who are trying to judge whether this guy should be the top law enforcement official in the United States of America, why information that was gathered by a bipartisan probe in the House should not be available to them, doesn't have an FBI AI evaluation? This report is being withheld from them. Can you sneak him into the attorney general's office simply because he's willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants? I mean, this is really a test for the Senate, in my view. The Article 1 of the Constitution is very clear. They have a responsibility to play here. And the question is whether their loyalty is to the Constitution or whether it's to Donald Trump.

Lulu, I mean, it is odd that Speaker Johnson is claiming that this would break precedent, releasing this report on Matt Gates, considering it's been done before.

That's not why he changed his tune. He's obviously changed his tune because Donald Trump wants him to change his tune. The fact of the matter is that Speaker Johnson actually doesn't have the final say in this. The committee does. They can choose to release the report if they want to. This is, again, one body of Congress having to inform another body of Congress. This isn't to release it to the general public, even, or to release it to the media to satisfy them. It's actually because it will help the Senate do their jobs. Now, here we are at a moment when it is Republican senators who are actually the only firewall for Donald Trump. I think what he's up to here is that he wants to really break Congress early, as early as possible. We are 10 days out of this election, and we are already in a standoff with Congress. You can only imagine what's going to happen when he gets into power. This is him trying to break it early so that when he gets there, there really won't be anything to stop him.

Matt, if an attorney is coming forward and saying he has these two clients who testified and this is what one client saw, do you think this changes things?

Yeah. I don't know if it changes anything because I think Matt Gates was going to have trouble getting confirmed even before these new revelations. We were just talking about Pete Hegset, and best to my knowledge, no one has ever accused him of any of those things prior to this. And so he's going to be given a little bit of the benefit of the doubt to explain himself. Compared that to Matt Gates, who is well-documented what the Ethics Committee has been investigating, and every single senator has been following this for a number of years. And I would expect that that report, whether it gets leaked to the New York Times or whether it gets sent to the Senate in a formal request, eventually is going to get to the senators here. I'm not sure that he was even in a place anyway that he'd be able to get to at least 50 votes, given how senators personally feel about Matt Gates because of his personality and antics in the House, let alone with all these allegations there. The thing that's going to likely even cement this form is just the drip, drip, drip nature of the way that this information is coming out.

The longer that his nomination sits out there, the more likely it is that more of these scandalous details go out, the more we hear about likely a lot of other eyewitness who are interviewed, and it's just going to be problematic for him and problematic for the President. We'll have to see exactly how this goes down, but my hunch is that it does at some point.

David, we mentioned CNN's reporting that Trump allies are pushing for Cash Patel to be the FBI director. Every President, as you said, you think most Presidents should be able to get all the people around them who they want. So many of these nominations have previously expressed, obviously, open hostility for the very same departments that they would end up overseeing.

Yeah, not to mention the fact that he has been in the forefront of saying he wants to weaponize the FBI to go after the President's political enemies, to go after reporters who displeased the President. What is very, very clear, and we've heard Donald Trump baying about the criminal justice system, about the Justice Department, about the FBI, now for four years or five years. And he is going to put... He wants to put loyalists in there who will do what he wants. He thinks those agencies actually work for him. I'm old enough to remember Watergate. And after Watergate, the President Ford called in a new attorney general, Edward Levy, to restore the public faith in that institution because it had been used for political purposes. And now, in one fell swoop. This President wants to reverse 50 years of history and norms and return these agencies to a very, very political footing. We'll see if he appoints Cash Patel. But one thing on the Gates issue, apparently this nomination was cooked up on a flight from Florida to Washington. That is the way he was nominated, that he was on the plane. They all thought, well, this is a good idea.

No background check, no thought to what this ethics evaluation or ethics report would mean. It's a crazy dangerous way to appoint one of the most important figures in the United States government.

Lulu, members of President Trump's criminal defense team have also been tapped for top roles in the Department of Justice. I mean, in any other administration, this would be unusual. Do you think they will fly under the radar with everyone who's discussing Matt Gates, Tulsi Gabbard, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right? You're flooding the zone. And so the scrutiny that something like that would get if a different President were doing that, a President-elect were doing that. Now, it's like, where are you going to actually target your ire? And this is the thing. You might put up a Matt Gates to deflect from some of the other more problematic that would be otherwise problematic in a different administration. This is the thing, flooding the zone, making sure that there's just this constant chaos, constant feeling of displacement, so that ultimately, he's going to get the cabinet that he wants.