After Trump announced that he had chosen Matt Gaetz as his attorney general, the business media and the Washington establishment made a collective pearl-clutch. The pond consensus is that the original Florida senator is “unqualified” to guide the Justice Department.
Never mind that those who make this claim are utterly incompetent to hold their own positions of power. ( Consider Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who , dismissed , Gaetz as not a” serious” pick. Murkowski is the poster child of incompetent and unserious Beltway drones. She , failed the bar examination four times , and just got a Senate seat because her dishonest father, Frank Murkowski, appointed her to his desk after he became a one-term governor of Alaska in 2002.)
But how precisely is Gaetz , unqualified , to guide the Justice Department? What else does the receiving attorney general of Trump need to be qualified to accomplish?
Generally, fresh home at the DOJ. Going back at least to 2016, the Justice Department has been a witch’s nest of politically motivated prosecutions, fake investigations, coup-plotting, home eavesdropping and repression, trap schemes, and the dehumanization of law-abiding Americans. We need people to go in and cut it out because the DOJ has become a cancer of our body politics thanks to the illegal snooping on Trump and the political persecution of the Jan. 6 accused.
We need a Justice Department that will never try to derail or impair the senator who was elected in the first place. As Will Chamberlain , noted on X,” The best way to know the Gaetz find is that it’s a speech by Trump that it’s not 2016 again and there will be no internal revolt against the sitting President”.
What we , do n’t  , need, after the plots against Trump during his first term and four years of a totally weaponized DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland, is business as usual. We do n’t need a former GOP prosecutor to serve as Trump’s “adult in the room” and “restrain him from his worst impulses.”
No, we need someone who has first knowledge of how dishonest and subpar the Justice Department has been under Garland’s leadership and who is equally as interested in what is said about him at Georgetown concoction parties and on MSNBC.
And since Gaetz was one of Garland’s political DOJ’s more well-known subjects, he might be the ideal choice. Gaetz was the subject of an 18-month fake DOJ investigation starting in March 2021, which was only fueled by a report that was published anonymously sourced and blatantly outrageous.
He was previously convicted and never even charged, but that was never the place. To solitude him was the place. Due to March 2021, Gaetz had been a powerful and influential advocate in Congress fighting back against the worst deeds and energy crimes committed by the Washington establishment. He led a group of Democratic lawmakers in a protest against Rep. Adam Schiff’s scheming impeachment hearings in the deep state and engaged Democrats in a public relations scuffle over the Russia cooperation, and he raised issues about Washington’s reaction to the mob on January 6 and the politically motivated prosecution of those responsible. Gaetz rapidly gained traction as one of the most powerful traditional lawmakers because of his frequent appearance on cable news.
All of that changed when Garland’s DOJ took him on after several private Court attorneys ‘ spills to The New York Times made him known. The Times duly published them, tarring Gaetz’s great title. The goal was to silence the vibrant Florida congressman by destroying his reputation, according to my colleague Mollie Hemingway in 2022:” Gaetz could n’t very well critic the Department of Justice for their political prosecutions if he was a pariah who everyone thought was a pedophile.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Gaetz’s resignation from the House was soon the subject of an ethics investigation that was being pursued by the Democratic-run Ethics Committee, which typically waits until the DOJ’s own investigation is finished. Like then-Rep. Liz Cheney, who was a Republican in the White House, not relented in making accusations against Gaetz and did so nearly as frequently as the corporate hit did.
Eighteen months later, after the advertising repeatedly criticized Gaetz for sex trafficking and pedophilia, the DOJ investigation was quietly dropped due to Gaetz’s dismal status and control. Another anonymously supplied history, this time , in The Washington Post, just said top career prosecutors recommended no costs.
Our Justice Department currently engages in that kind of behavior. Along with a corrupt and violent FBI, it violently attacks its detractors through sits, leaks, and unrelenting lawfare. It develops false theft schemes, like those used to prosecute the governor of Michigan. Gretchen Whitmer. When Supreme Court justices are the target of execution plots and violent threats, things turn the other way. It improperly targets members of Congress. People who threatens its strength, including the original and soon-to-be leader, is fair game.
The last thing Trump needs at DOJ is a Bill Barr-style careerist. The entire office is nasty, and it poses a danger to the country’s citizens. Most of the careerists there need to be run out of the place—and next unlawfully investigated.
That means a commitment, determination, and confidence to clean up and reform the Justice Department — or, barring that, destroy it entirely — are the only skills necessary to brain Trump’s DOJ. Thus, Gaetz is more than qualified for the given work. He’s most likely the ideal candidate for the position.
