Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) handily won his primary on Tuesday despite a federal investigation into alleged sex trafficking hovering over his candidacy.
His primary challenger, former FedEx executive Mark Lombardo, aired TV ads focusing on allegations the GOP lawmaker paid for sex with an underage girl, hoping the scandal would be enough to tank Gaetz’s bid for renomination to Florida’s 1st Congressional District.
“Matt Gaetz is a hypocrite and nothing but a me-first professional politician who entangled himself in a child sex-trafficking investigation and then sought a pardon for ‘any and all’ crimes to keep himself out of jail,” Lombardo said in one of his attacks, referring to reports that Gaetz requested a blanket pardon from Donald Trump.
GAETZ: WOULD RATHER TRIM NANCY PELOSI’S ‘TOENAILS WITH MY TEETH’ THAN DINE WITH SCHIFF
But Gaetz, buoyed by his family name in Florida politics and an endorsement from the former president, emerged unscathed from his first primary since the investigation was announced, defeating Lombardo by 45 points. Due to the deep-red lean of the district, Gaetz, first elected in 2016, will almost certainly return to Congress for a fourth term.
“Congressman Gaetz is humbled by the support of his voters,” spokesman Joel Valdez told the Washington Examiner after Gaetz’s win.
The accusations, revealed in March of last year, are being investigated by the Justice Department as part of a broader inquiry into political ally Joel Greenberg, a tax collector in Seminole County who has pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and public corruption charges. He awaits sentencing on Dec. 1.
The news created a firestorm on Capitol Hill last year, with the congressman facing pressure to resign and his committee assignments in jeopardy. Onetime allies left him to fend for himself, and two of his staff members quit.
Nonetheless, Gaetz, who has not been charged and denies the allegations, refused to resign. In the months since, he has toured the country, unapologetically promoting Trump’s brand of conservative populism alongside conservatives such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
Yet the federal investigation still looms in the background. The Daily Beast reported Thursday that the inquiry is still moving forward, albeit methodically. Any public update is likely a few months off, with the outlet reporting that prosecutors don’t want the appearance of trying to interfere in the midterm elections.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said last year that Gaetz would lose his committee assignments if he’s found guilty of the allegations.
Yet, for now, the investigation doesn’t appear to be derailing his career in Congress. Florida political strategist Ford O’Connell believes Gaetz’s allegiance to Trump helped him win the primary so comfortably.
“The fact that President Trump expressed confidence in him is the reason why he won,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Basically, the voters in northwest Florida said, ‘Absent any new information, Matt Gaetz is our guy,’ and I think it’s really as simple as that.”
Lombardo tried to drive a wedge between Gaetz and the former president’s supporters by alleging the lawmaker was the “informant” who reportedly tipped off the FBI to the whereabouts of classified documents possibly being stored at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. But the accusation wasn’t enough to deter Republican voters.
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O’Connell said the work of Don Gaetz, the congressman’s father, as a state senator for eight years helped to “build up not just name recognition but trust” that the younger Gaetz grafted into the Trump brand.
“The Gaetz name in northwest Florida goes beyond Matt,” he said. “Matt is the one who refashioned it as more of a ‘America First’ MAGA ally, which is conservative, but the point is, it’s not like Matt Gaetz just sort of caught a MAGA wave in the way that others, like, we might say, [Marjorie Taylor Greene], did.”
Matt Gaetz will face Democratic nominee Rebekah Jones, a former Florida data scientist who said she was fired for refusing to manipulate COVID-19 data, in the general election.
