'Really messy': Ex-ethics chair says Mike Johnson just made things worse for Matt Gaetz

House speaker Mike Johnson made things worse for Matt Gaetz for weighing in on the release of a "pretty nasty" House Ethics Committee report on his alleged sexual misconduct, according to that panel's former chairman.

Donald Trump nominated the Florida Republican for attorney general the day before the report on sex trafficking allegations was set to be released, and Johnson has said the findings should not be released now that Gaetz has resigned his congressional seat, but former ethics chair Charlie Dent told CNN the speaker should have stayed out of the fracas.

"I am certain that they looked at this case they reviewed it, they deposed all these various people, and I suspect that report is pretty nasty," Dent said. "I suspect they all were going to vote for [releasing] it prior to his resignation, so I think there's a lot in there. I'm sure that the the report recommends sanctions of some sort – reprimand, censure, expulsion, in the worst cases – that's moot now that he resigned. So that's what they're looking at, and they're also, by the way, if the committee uncovers potential criminal wrongdoing, they can refer the matter to the Justice Department."

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That's the department that Gaetz would lead if the Republican-led Senate agrees to confirm the Trump nominee.

"I don't know what's in this report, but this is really messy," Dent said, "and Matt Gaetz did not resign because this report was going to be clean. So I suspect they did their job professionally and thoroughly, the committee, bipartisan basis, now they're caught up over this issue of a post-resignation release, and that's unfortunate. But I do think they'll get to it and, by the way, I don't think speaker Johnson did anybody any favors by running his mouth and saying this shouldn't go public."

Dent said the speaker should have allowed the ethics committee to maintain its independence, as his predecessors had, instead of issuing a directive to its members, although the panel ultimately could not reach an agreement on releasing the report.

"You know, when I got appointed to this committee the only thing John Boehner ever asked me to do is just make sure the committee functions – that's it," Dent said, and he said the next speaker, Paul Ryan, never wanted to hear from him. "Frankly, that's true, and same with Ryan and [Nancy] Pelosi. She was speaker, too, while I was on the committee. I never was involved in any of them ever trying to intervene or interfere with any type of an investigation or how we should go about it."

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