One of his most loyal ideological allies. The president-elect of the United States, Republican Donald Trump, announced this Wednesday that he will appoint Congressman Matt Gaetz, from the party’s hardline, as the country’s next attorney general. The Florida congressman is loyal to Trump, thrives on controversy and was investigated by the House ethics committee for sexual misconduct and embezzlement.
Since his arrival in Washington, this legislator has forged a political brand as a far-right provocateur, seeking controversy as something natural.
“Matt will end instrumentalized government, secure our borders, dismantle criminal organizations, and restore Americans’ eroded faith and trust in the Department of Justice,” Trump said in a statement. Confirmation of the position is subject to confirmation by the Senate, which is in the hands of Republicans.
The expectation of “ending instrumentalized government” is not a metaphor. Throughout the campaign, Trump has accused Joe Biden’s administration of instrumentalizing the Justice Department to persecute him politically. Likewise, Trump has promised revenge and persecute his political rivals once he comes to power. The blacklist of the now president-elect is even more terrifying with Gaetz as attorney general.
Gaetz will take the place of Merrick B. Garland, who appointed Jack Smith as special prosecutor to lead the prosecutions in the two federal cases against Trump: that of the classified Mar-a-Lago papers and that of the assault on the Capitol on the sixth of January.
Smith has been considering for days how to continue with the cases until January 20, when Trump will take office and can no longer be prosecuted. One of the options on the table is for Garland to order him to close the cases. One of the legal advisors of the Republican Party, Mike Davis, mocked a few days ago about the uncertain future of Smith, who may be one of the first to fall under the magnate’s wrath. “Dear Jack Smith: Please hire a lawyer,” Davis wrote on Platform X.
Like Donald Trump, to whom he is fiercely loyal, Gaetz is more interested in confronting his political adversaries than in the dry business of governing, according to his critics. On Capitol Hill he has repeatedly disrupted House proceedings, even once broke in at a high-security facility where Democrats were holding a hearing.
In 2018 he was convicted for inviting a denier from the Holocaust to Trump’s State of the Union speech. A year later, he hired a speechwriter who had left the Trump administration after speaking at a conference that regularly draws white nationalists.
Months after the January 6 assault on the Capitol, Gaetz embarked on an ‘America First’ tour with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman from Georgia, in which they amplified the former president’s lies about fraud in the US election. 2020. He also continued to attack Republicans critical of Trump, using language that reportedly alarmed McCarthy, who feared the lawmakers’ words could incite violence.
Gaetz, like Trump, has been one of the fierce defenders of pardoning the more than a thousand people who were convicted for the assault on the Capitol. On January 6, members of the far-right militia known as the “Proud Boys” participated and led the attack. Enrique Tarradio, the president of the Proud Boys, has one of the highest prison sentences handed down: 22 years in prison.
Although Trump did not include it in his victory speech in Palm Beach on election night, one of the promises he intends to keep on his first day as acting president is to pardon the assailants. Some of them celebrated the magnate’s victory, although Trump has not assured that it is a collective pardon. The Republican said he would decide “case by case” when he returns to the White House and to do so he will have Gaetz at his side, who on previous occasions has not only shown sympathy for the assailants in general, but also for the Proud Boys.
Source: www.eldiario.es
