House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to weigh in on whether she believes Rep. Matt Gaetz should resign amid allegations that he violated sex trafficking laws, saying it’s an opinion reserved for her GOP colleagues.
“It is up to the Republicans to take responsibility for that,” Pelosi said Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “And it is up to the Republican leader, Mr. McCarthy, to act upon that behavior.”
While Pelosi said she believes there’s been a “clear violation” of House ethics rules, she referred back to the investigation the House Ethics Committee is conducting on Gaetz. The Florida congressman is also the subject of a federal investigation over the allegations.
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Gaetz, who labeled the assertions against him as “smears” during a speech on Friday, has been accused of having sex with a minor and using campaign funds to pay for her travel. He also allegedly showed explicit photos of women he slept with on the House floor and bragged to his colleagues about his sexual conquests.
Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, called the allegations “sickening,” but she stopped short of calling for Gaetz’s resignation.
“As the mother of daughters, the charges certainly are sickening. And as the speaker noted, there is an ethics investigation underway. There are also criminal investigations underway. And I’m not going to comment further on that publicly right now,” Cheney said Sunday.
Gaetz has been one of Cheney’s biggest critics, openly campaigning against her reelection in Wyoming in late January, after she voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial.
The congressman has denied all allegations against him, and he claimed his family was targeted by a $25 million extortion scheme, though the people he named denied there was an extortion attempt, accusing him of staging a distraction.
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Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan, who closely align with the former president in a similar nature to Gaetz, came to his defense, though few other colleagues of the Florida Republican have.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who has distanced himself from the pro-Trump wing of his party, was the first Republican to call for Gaetz to resign last week.
The Washington Examiner contacted McCarthy’s office for comment but did not immediately hear back.
