Matt Gaetz Drops AG Nom—and May Accidentally Screw Himself in Process

Matt Gaetz rescinded his nomination to become Donald Trump’s attorney general on Thursday, writing in a statement that he believed his confirmation would become a “distraction” from Trump’s second administration.

“I had excellent meetings with Senators yesterday,” Gaetz wrote on X. “I appreciate their thoughtful feedback—and the incredible support of so many. While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz continued. “I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

Trump nominated the remarkably unpopular Florida politico to become the country’s attorney general last week, a decision that would have effectively handed the keys to the Justice Department to a man facing sex trafficking allegations.

But Gaetz’s confirmation seemed increasingly unlikely in the days since his nomination. He faced immense opposition from inside his own party at a time when any of Trump’s nominees for his upcoming Cabinet can only afford to lose three Republican votes during their Senate confirmation process.

By Friday, estimates from inside the upper chamber predicted that Gaetz could face anywhere from 12 Republican “no” votes to upward of 30, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Gaetz resigned from Congress last week after his nomination was announced, abruptly crushing a House Ethics Committee probe investigating reports that Gaetz had sex with an underage girl.

He reportedly pulled his nomination Thursday just minutes after CNN reached out to the ex-lawmaker for comment on a bombshell revelation that the Ethics Committee had been notified of a second sexual encounter between Gaetz and the same 17-year-old.

In a statement following Gaetz’s withdrawal, Trump said he had “much respect” for the Florida politician for minimizing the distraction and predicted Gaetz would have a “wonderful future.”

Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration for attorney general now leaves him completely out of power. He could attempt to run in his district’s special election to recoup his lost seat in the House, though it’s unclear if doing so would reignite the Ethics investigation into his alleged misconduct.

This story has been updated.

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee announced plans Thursday to form a new subcommittee to work alongside the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the meme-based advisory group led by right-wing propaganda czar Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The subcommittee will be headed by the person least interested in actually governing in all of Congress: Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a source familiar told Fox News Digital.

The proposed House subcommittee is expected to investigate government spending and organization in federal agencies, posturing as if it will slash bureaucratic “red tape” while actually making it much harder for the government to get anything done at all.

Ramaswamy confirmed to Fox News Digital that he had met with House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and Greene to discuss the new subcommittee.

“Looking forward to working together with Congress,” Ramaswamy wrote in a post on X Wednesday. “Proper oversight of agencies & public transparency are critical.”

Musk and Ramaswamy published an op-ed about their plans for the department on Wednesday, outlining their scheme to slash the federal budget and the essential services it provides—such as public broadcasting, Planned Parenthood, and Medicare and Medicaid—with the hopes of cutting government spending by $2 trillion by July 2026 to make life more expensive and miserable for every single U.S. citizen, while private companies and billionaires get rich selling those products that were once provided by the government.

Nancy Mace’s thinly veiled transphobia is getting old fast—just ask Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“What Nancy Mace, and what Speaker Johnson are doing, [is] endangering all women and girls. Because if you ask them, ‘What is your plan on how to enforce this?’ they won’t come up with an answer,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters after being asked about Mace’s string of targeted anti-transgender resolutions against Delaware’s Representative-elect Sarah McBride, the first ever openly trans woman in Congress.

“The idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trow … because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “They’re doing this so that Nancy Mace can make a buck, and send a text, and fundraise off an email. They’re not doing this to protect people.”

Mace, a GOP representative from South Carolina, introduced a resolution on Tuesday that would forbid trans women from using the restroom that aligns with their gender identity in the U.S. Capitol Building. The only trans elected official in the Capitol Building is Representative-elect Sarah McBride.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace said. She added that McBride “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop.”

Mace has continued to shame and harass McBride online. She posted a video of her taping a sign reading “biological” right over a “men’s” bathroom sign in the Capitol building. Early Wednesday morning she posted a video stating that she’d be filing another resolution to “ban biological men from women’s spaces on all federal property all across the country.”

Mace was thus empowered after House Speaker Mike Johnson officially stated that transgender women would be banned from women’s restrooms throughout the Capitol complex. But as Representative Ocasio-Cortez noted, it is very unclear how Johnson plans to enforce this ruling.

Democratic Representative Mark Pocan was also swift to react to Johnson’s decision. “As Chair of the Equality Caucus, I requested a meeting with Speaker Johnson to discuss his bathroom ban and open his eyes to the reality that this policy is cruel, completely unenforceable, and opens the door for abuse, harassment, and discrimination in the halls of Congress,” he wrote on Bluesky.

For her part, McBride has recognized that Mace is out for attention and endeavored to not feed her trollery. “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” she said in a statement, “I will follow the rules as outlined by speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”

Mace, who is no stranger to spectacle, has made a habit of doing weird, attention-seeking gender cosplay on Capitol Hill. Last October, she wore a shirt bearing a large scarlet letter A after she joined the infamous Matt Gaetz in voting to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a sort of MAGA House mutiny. It was not immediately apparent what the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne character had to do with the speakership fiasco. (Just as confusingly, Mace seems to not be worried about Gaetz lurking around Capitol Hill’s washrooms.) Suffice it to say, her most recent hateful charade, made under the guise of “protecting women,” will likely only result in more women getting hurt.

CNN reports that Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent turned conservative media B-lister, is up for consideration to run the agency for which he once worked. Bongino, who has periodically faced various social media sanctions for posting incendiary content over the years, is on Trump’s Secret Service short list, along with the former head of his personal detail, Robert Engel, and the head of his current Secret Service detail, Sean Curran. Engel was with Trump on January 6, 2021, and testified to the House January 6 committee about Trump’s speech at the Ellipse that day.

Bongino has run for Congress three times, twice in Maryland and once in Florida; he lost all three times. After failing to launch a political career, he went into punditry, becoming a commentator on right-wing talk radio and social media. He quickly became known as a leading election denialist, January 6 insurrectionist defender, and Covid-19 conspiracist.

Bongino would go on to host his own show on Fox News from 2021 to 2023, and today hosts The Dan Bongino Show on Rumble. He was critical of ousted Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle in the wake of the July assassination attempt against Trump, calling her “utterly unqualified” and accusing her of “putting politics ahead of presidential protection.”

That may well have endeared him to the president-elect, who has a personal stake in who takes over the agency in charge of protecting himself and his family. Trump also was a guest on Bongino’s podcast in October—an encounter that could hardly be called a hard-hitting interview, with multiple compliments exchanged.

It’s no secret that Trump watches a lot of television and seems to be favoring a “central casting” approach to his second-term appointments. Among those peppered throughout his agency picks are former Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, daytime talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and his pick for secretary of transportation—former congressman, Fox News host, and reality TV star Sean Duffy. Should Bongino get the nod to head the Secret Service, he will fit right in with all of those personalities.

That said, heading up the Secret Service is not the best platform for maintaining one’s media infamy—unless, of course, Bongino warps the role to suit his personal needs and desires. The job, which normally has a low media profile, could very likely become part of Trump’s media circus in the hands of someone whose first priority is maintaining their own high profile or remaining a fixture on right-wing media. For someone like Trump who loves high TV ratings, that’s probably just what he wants. Whether that suits the numerous other people under Secret Service protection remains to be seen.

South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace’s bathroom crusade is nothing more than a shallow stunt for attention, at least according to the lawmaker’s former communications director.

Mace has spent the majority of her week advancing a bill with the aim of banning one person from using toilets on Capitol Hill—Representative-elect Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person to be elected to Congress.

Hill alum Natalie Johnson torched her old boss for what she saw as a transparent media grab, posting on X that the attacks on McBride were little more than Mace’s “ploy to get on Fox.”

In response to a Mace team message that read, “I don’t want to see your junk in my bathroom,” Johnson said, “I don’t want to see your botched, cheap hooker-inspired boob job on my television. Can we introduce a bill to bar that?”

”Tweeting 262 times about a bill that applies to like .00000001% of Congress in 36 hours is definitely about protecting women. It’s certainly not just a ploy for media attention,” Johnson posted in a separate tweet.

The Republican communications strategist then argued that a real effort to protect women would involve preventing Matt Gaetz—who up until last week was being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct with a minor—from being confirmed as Donald Trump’s attorney general.

“‘Protecting women’ in Congress would be introducing a bill to bar Matt Gaetz, a sexual predator with an affinity for underage girls, from ever walking those halls again, rather than dropping a messaging bill that’s sole goal is getting on TV,” Johnson wrote.

The attention-seeking congresswoman openly acknowledged that the stunt was a direct attack on McBride, telling reporters on Monday that it was “that and more.”

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace said, adding that the newly elected Delaware congresswoman “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop.”

In another interview, Mace claimed that the mere thought of a trans woman walking into a women’s locker room “feels like assault.”

But the whole charade appears especially hollow in light of the fact that Mace and McBride both have private bathrooms in their offices. The only people that the bill will actually hurt will be the nonelected trans employees of the U.S. Capitol complex, who apparently have—until now—been using the bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity with no issue.