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      The sleazy, sordid Matt Gaetz scandal: are the walls now closing in on him?

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      There could have been no more fitting venue for the bellicose US congressman Matt Gaetz to launch his nationwide “America first” speaking tour than The Villages. Where better to perpetuate the fantasy that all is going well for a politician seen as the “ultimate Maga bro” than Florida’s ultra-conservative “Disney World for retirees”?The Republican loyalists who filled the ballroom of the Brownwood hotel and spa on Friday night didn’t come to hear whether the embattled Gaetz ever paid a 17-year-old minor for sex, took sleazy sex-trafficking trips to the Bahamas or assisted in his disgraced former “wingman” Joel Greenberg’s efforts to install cronies in well-paid positions of political power.But the scandal now engulfing Gaetz is truly one of the most remarkable, sleazy and tabloid-ready in recent American politics. Away from all the Donald Trump cheerleading by Gaetz and his fellow rightwing fire-starter Marjorie Taylor Greene during their national tour of distraction, it is hard to escape the notion that the walls are closing in.Much of the focus is on a justice department inquiry into the 39-year-old Florida congressman that, in recent days, is reported to have grown beyond initial sex trafficking allegations to an inquiry involving alleged corruption.According to the Associated Press, federal investigators are now looking into Gaetz’s connections with medical marijuana, and whether certain friends and associates with interests in the nascent yet lucrative industry in Florida influenced or enriched themselves from legislation the politician was sponsoring.Neither Gaetz or the justice department responded to requests for comment, and the FBI has previously told the Guardian that it “declines to confirm nor deny the existence or status of an investigation”.But it is the salacious side of the allegations, and his friendship with Greenberg, the former Seminole county tax collector now in jail on 33 federal charges from stalking to sex trafficking a child, which have garnered most attention.Gaetz, who represents a large swath of Florida’s panhandle, has tried to distance himself from Greenberg, despite an avalanche of evidence that the pair were close. It includes tweets showing the two friends with Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis; receipts of Venmo payments from Gaetz to Greenberg in the same amount that Greenberg then immediately paid to a teenage girl; and a “creepy” voicemail the pair sent in 2019 to Anna Eskamani, a young Democratic state congresswoman.Perhaps the most damning development came a week ago when the Daily Beast published a stunning “confession” letter it said was written by Greenberg to Roger Stone, a close ally and political “fixer” of Trump, allegedly seeking a pardon from the then president in exchange for $250,000.Notably, it implicated Gaetz directly in paying numerous women for sex, including a girl who was 17 at the time and who is now said to be a sex industry worker. “My lawyers, that I fired, know the whole story about MG’s involvement,” Greenberg allegedly wrote in one text to Stone, according to the Beast.“They know he paid me to pay the girls and that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage.”Stone acknowledged to the Beast that Greenberg had tried to hire him to secure a pardon from Trump, but denied seeking or receiving payment for his assistance.Gaetz, meanwhile, has always insisted the claim he had a relationship with a minor is “verifiably false”. In a bizarre, freewheeling appearance on Fox News in March, the same day the New York Times first reported the existence of the federal inquiry, Gaetz claimed he was himself the victim of an $25m extortion plot involving a justice department official.He also attempted to draw the Fox host, Tucker Carlson, into the scandal by claiming that Carlson and his wife had been to dinner with Gaetz and a female friend whom he said was later “threatened by the FBI”.A surprised Carlson said he did not recall meeting the mystery woman, and subsequently called it “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted”.Prosecutors, meanwhile, have a 15 May deadline to strike a plea deal with Greenberg, set by US district court judge Gregory Presnell in April. Greenberg’s attorney Fritz Scheller said after the hearing that his client was cooperating, telling reporters: “I am sure Matt Gaetz is not feeling very comfortable today.”Outwardly, Gaetz has remained defiant, ignoring some calls from within his own party to resign while still enjoying the support of Republican leadership. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, has said he will not take any action unless charges are filed.But the scandal has caused two Gaetz aides to resign, and political opponents in Florida have stepped up their criticism as the Greenberg plea deal deadline approaches.Eskamani said she went public with the voicemail partly to expose the “bro culture” in Tallahassee politics within which, she said, Gaetz and Greenberg flourished.“Political institutions as a whole are very male-dominated, there’s a sense of privilege and often those in public office come from a family lineage or wealth or establishment,” she said. “It’s hard to get in if you don’t come from those experiences.“It’s not like Matt Gaetz created bro culture, but he absolutely benefited from it, exploited it and is being protected by it today. It’s slimy characters, tons of money, inappropriate use of power when it comes to lavish trips, and the use of sex and drugs to also exhibit your power. It’s just gross all around.”She added: “[But] there is no doubt in my mind that there will be charges he will face. I think it’s going to take time for the DoJ to build that case, but I feel confident there will be consequences for his behavior.” More

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      Liz Cheney a martyr to resistance as Republican party picks cult of Trump

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      She is a champion of the hawkish foreign policy espoused by her father, a former US vice-president dubbed “Darth Vader”. She is a hardline conservative whose opposition to gay marriage pained her lesbian sister.Now Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney finds herself a likely martyr of the resistance to ex-president Donald Trump, earning plaudits from party moderates and even some Democrats for swearing allegiance to truth rather than lies.Cheney appears all but certain next week to lose her status as the sole woman in Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. Members have been lining up to express a lack of confidence in her and instead tout Elise Stefanik, a pro-Trump congresswoman, as her successor.Cheney’s cardinal sin is to reject Trump’s “big lie” that last year’s election was stolen from him, increasingly the definitive loyalty test within the party. On the contrary, she has spoken out in public, tweeted that the false claim is “poisoning our democratic system” and even published a newspaper column urging colleagues to spurn the “Trump cult of personality”.The former president has fired back, branding her a “warmonger” and throwing his weight behind Stefanik. Future historians may regard it as a fork in the road for Republicans: a choice between a conspiratorial demagogue and a return to conservatism, institutionalism and fact-based reality. It seems clear that Cheney will lose, much to the despair of admiring “Never Trumpers”.“I think that there should be a line of Republicans around the block standing up to defend her,” Michael Wood, who won just 3% of the vote in a Republican primary in Texas earlier this month, told the MSNBC network. “This is probably the bravest woman in the western hemisphere.“She’s a modern-day Margaret Thatcher, an iron lady, and she’s being stabbed in the back not over policy differences; she’s being stabbed in the back because she won’t lie. It’s horrible what’s happening and I don’t know if I want to be in a party that doesn’t want somebody in it who’s speaking the truth.”Cheney, 54, is now the face of a Republican establishment that became a target of Trump’s wrecking ball populism but also has few friends on the left. She served at the state department, practised law at the International Finance Corporation and co-wrote a book with her father Dick Cheney, entitled Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, that defended the George W Bush administration’s approval of the use of torture.In 2013, running for the US Senate in Wyoming, Cheney told Fox News that she believed “in the traditional definition of marriage” and disagreed on the issue with her sister, Mary, who is married to a woman. Mary responded on Facebook: “Liz – this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree – you’re just wrong – and on the wrong side of history.”In 2016 Cheney won election to Congress, serving as Wyoming’s lone member in the House, and soon became chair of the House Republican Conference, making her the No 3 Republican in the chamber. She survived an initial challenge earlier this year after she was among just 10 House Republicans to back Trump’s impeachment for inciting supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January.But this time she has few public backers for a vote that could come as early as Wednesday. She has decided instead to go down with all guns blazing. In an opinion column in the Washington Post this week, Cheney insisted that she would defend basic principles irrespective of the short-term political price.She wrote: “I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law. The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have.”Her stand has coincided with a recent book tour by her father’s old boss, Bush, in which he warned that the Trump-era Republican party has become “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist”. Dick Cheney himself, now 80, has kept a relatively low profile since leaving office but is likely to be proud of his daughter’s position.Jake Bernstein, co-author of the book Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, said: “I think part of the reason for why Liz Cheney is doing what she’s doing is directly the result of her father in the sense that her father was the very embodiment of the Republican establishment for decades.“Whether you agreed or disagreed, they did have principles and an ideology and I think they are probably appalled that the Republican party has become a cult of Donald Trump. I assume that she’s in constant contact with her father and that she would stand up for that Republican party that’s been swept away in the age of Trump.”It is rare for Liz Cheney and liberals to find themselves on the same side of any argument, Bernstein acknowledged. “She’s still very conservative. She would never see eye to eye with Democrats on anything else but a belief in the institution of Congress and the democratic process. To believe that she is in any way a moderate politically says more about what Donald Trump has done to the Republican party than it does about her.”The author and journalist added: “One of the biggest recalibrations that is needed in American political discourse is that most of these Republicans are not conservatives: they don’t want to maintain conservative traditions, they don’t have a conservative ideology. They’re radical in their approach and to call them conservative is a misnomer. Liz Cheney is a true conservative in every sense of the word and she’s only a moderate in relation to the radicalism that has seized the Republican party.”The effort to purge Cheney is seen by critics as one of the most striking examples yet of Republicans’ shift away from focusing on a program of government in favor of dancing to Trump’s tune. Instead of policy, loyalty to Trump and “culture wars” are now the glue that hold the party together.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The thing that’s hard to remember is Cheney is an arch-conservative. She’s a hard-edged, small government, lower taxes figure and a leading voice on national defense but the Republican party is no longer organized along the axis of ideology; it’s organized along the axis of cult of personality.“This is a low point for the Republican party. It’s embarrassing and really gives you a sense of how unmoored it is from the issues facing the country.”Cheney appears to be a victim of Republicans’ strategy for winning back the House in next year’s midterm elections, which often hinge on a party’s most fervent supporters. Trump is still hugely popular with the grassroots and is seen as critical for both mobilizing voter enthusiasm and fundraising. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, appears to be betting on Trump to win him the speakership, even if it means legitimizing “the big lie”.In such a context, Cheney might have felt that she had nothing to lose by nailing her colors to the mast now. Tim Miller, writer-at-large at the Bulwark website and former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, said: “Say what you want about the Cheneys, I think that she has a deep, genuine respect for our democratic system and is genuinely outraged by the president’s actions after the election.” More

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      in US Politics

      Tucker Carlson for president?: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As rumours swirl that Fox News’s primetime show host might run to be Republican nominee in 2024, Jonathan Freedland speaks to former GOP communications director Tara Setmayer about the danger this would pose to American democracy

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Tucker Carlson is in the news a lot these days. Depending which side of the political divide you are on in the US, you will find millions on the right adore him, or millions on the left loathe him. So what would happen if Carlson announced he was going to run for presidency in 2024? Would the Republican party back him? Would he simply be the second incarnation of Donald Trump? Jonathan and Tara discuss this rumoured prospect, delving into the history of this divisive figure and how he came to be the ratings powerhouse he is today. Read David Smith’s piece on 200 years of Guardian US coverage Read analysis of Facebook’s decision to extend Donald Trump’s ‘indefinite suspension’ from the platform Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      in US Politics

      Trump asserts power over Republicans as Liz Cheney faces ousting

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      Donald Trump is poised to tighten his grip on the Republican party with the ousting of one of his most prominent critics in Congress.Liz Cheney, the only woman in Republican leadership in the House of Representatives, is widely expected to be voted out next week by members loyal to Trump.Cheney is a diehard conservative and daughter of George W Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney. Her removal for refusing to parrot Trump’s “big lie” that last year’s election was stolen would exemplify how the Republican party remains beholden to the disgraced ex-president.“The whole @RepLizCheney saga has been so clarifying,” David Axelrod, former chief strategist for Barack Obama, tweeted on Thursday. “She’s as conservative as they come. Her only sin was to call BS on Trump’s election fraud. For that, she will be expelled as a @GOP leader. The party is branding itself.”Multiple courts, as well as state and federal election officials, have rejected Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. But Republican-controlled state legislatures are using his allegations to justify legislation imposing new restrictions on voting.And far from backing down, Trump has issued several public statements in three days reiterating his baseless claims that Joe Biden’s 7m vote margin of victory was the result of fraud while attacking Republicans who refuse to buy into this narrative.He also joined Republican House leaders in backing Elise Stefanik, a pro-Trump congresswoman, for Cheney’s job as chair of the party’s conference. A vote could come as early as next Wednesday.Stefanik, 36, whose status in the party rose after she aggressively defended Trump during congressional hearings ahead of his 2019 impeachment, reportedly spoke to the former president by phone on Wednesday.Trump said in a statement: “Liz Cheney is a warmongering fool who has no business in Republican Party Leadership … Elise Stefanik is a far superior choice, and she has my COMPLETE and TOTAL Endorsement for GOP Conference Chair.”Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader, appears to have calculated that embracing Trump offers the party’s best chance of winning back the House in next year’s midterm elections. McCarthy was caught by a “hot mic” on Fox News saying of Cheney: “I’ve had it with her. You know, I’ve lost confidence.”A statement from the office of Steve Scalise, the number two House Republican, made it explicit: “House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda, and Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for Conference Chair.”Congressman Jim Jordan, an outspoken Trump loyalist, insisted that “the votes are there” to oust Cheney. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair reciting Democrat talking points,” he told Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90% of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74m Americans voted for.”During Trump’s presidency, Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. They are now looking to claw back narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in the midterm elections next year.But Cheney, the No 3 Republican in the House, is not going down without a fight. In an opinion column in the Washington Post on Wednesday, she urged her colleagues to reject the “dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality” in order to save the party, warning: “History is watching”.Cheney wrote: “Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work – confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this.“The Republican party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the constitution.”Cheney, 54, held off an initial challenge to her leadership position earlier this year after she was among just 10 House Republicans to back Trump’s impeachment for inciting supporters to attack the US Capitol on 6 January. But she has few public supporters this time, dashing hopes that the former president might finally be losing sway.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Most of the Republicans were just too cowardly to speak what Liz Cheney has been saying publicly, which is why she survived the vote of no confidence the first time. She’s not going to survive it this time because it’s been clear that Donald Trump still has that hold on the party and they need him to raise money.”Stefanik, who represents an upstate New York district, began her House career in 2015 as a moderate who spoke out against Trump’s ban on immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries.Setmayer added: “Elise Stefanik was an up-and-comer, a moderate who a lot of people saw potential to be a leader in the party. She was young, she was smart and she made a calculated decision to hop on the Trump train to bolster her political fortunes and if that’s not an example of selling your soul for political expediency, I don’t know what is.”Biden, meanwhile. said a “mini-revolution” over identity appeared to be under way in the Republican party. “Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he told reporters at the White House. More

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      Florida governor signs new restrictive bill in ‘blatant attack on right to vote’

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      The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has signed a bill imposing new limits on voting by mail and using ballot drop boxes, the latest Republican-backed voting restrictions to become law in a US election battleground state.The White House swiftly criticized the law, saying Florida was “moving in the wrong direction”.The new law restricts the use of absentee ballot drop boxes to the early voting period, adds new identification requirements for requesting such ballots, and requires voters to reapply for absentee ballots in each new general election cycle. Previously, Florida voters only had to apply once every two election cycles.The law also gives partisan election observers more power to raise objections and requires people offering voters assistance to stay at least 150ft (45 meters) away from polling places, an increase from the previous 100ft radius.The deputy White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, blamed the new voting restrictions on Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” – the baseless assertion that there was widespread fraud in the presidential election.“There is no legitimate reason to change the rules right now to make it harder to vote,” Jean-Pierre said. “The only reason to change the rules right now is if you don’t like who voted. And that should be out of bounds.”Republican legislators in dozens of states have pursued measures to restrict voting rights in the aftermath of former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. Lawmakers in the Texas house of representatives were poised on Thursday to advance sweeping new voting limits despite opposition from numerous businesses.Minutes after DeSantis signed the law, the League of Women Voters of Florida and two other civil rights groups sued Florida’s 67 counties to try to block the new restrictions. They are represented by Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who also sued Georgia over voting limits the state passed in March.The Florida branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Disability Rights Florida and the good government group Common Cause also sued the state on Thursday, arguing the limits would disproportionately hurt Black, Latino and disabled voters.Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, called the move a “blatant and calculated attack on the right to vote” and a “horrifying reminder” of the “fragility of democracy”.Republican lawmakers have cited the unfounded claims made by Trump, a Florida absentee voter himself, after his decisive loss to Joe Biden.Judges rejected such claims in more than 60 lawsuits that failed to overturn the election result. Lawmakers in Republican-controlled states, including Georgia, Texas and Arizona, nevertheless proposed legislation they said was necessary to curb voter fraud, which is extremely rare in the United States.Local news outlets were barred from DeSantis’s signing of the bill on Thursday. The governor, who is expected to soon announce his re-election campaign, instead gave Fox News an “exclusive” of the event.“It was on national TV, it wasn’t secret,” DeSantis told reporters.The governor’s unusual decision to grant only Fox access to the event prompted complaints from journalists that DeSantis was preventing the public from witnessing crucial government business.DeSantis acknowledged in February that Florida had “held the smoothest, most successful election of any state in the country”, but said new limits on absentee ballots were needed to safeguard election integrity.DeSantis, who signed the law in an appearance on the Fox News Channel show Fox & Friends, said, “Me signing this bill here says, ‘Florida, your vote counts, your vote is going to be cast with integrity and transparency.’”Mail-in ballots or absentee ballots were used by Democratic voters in greater numbers than Republicans in the 2020 election, as many people avoided in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic.Florida Republicans used mail-in voting slightly more than Democrats in the 2014, 2016 and 2018 general elections. But in November, Democrats submitted 2.2m mail-in ballots compared with 1.5m from Republicans, state records show, after Trump falsely asserted for months that mail voting was rife with fraud.In March, Georgia’s Republican governor signed a law that tightened absentee ballot identification requirements, restricted ballot drop-box use and allowed a Republican-controlled state agency to take over local voting operations.Democrats and voting rights advocates sued Georgia over the measure, saying it was aimed at disenfranchising Black voters, who helped propel Biden to the presidency and deliver Democrats two US Senate victories in Georgia in January that gave them control of the chamber. Top US companies also decried Georgia’s law, and Major League Baseball moved its all-star game out of the state in protest. More

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      in Elections

      Arizona Republicans hunt for bamboo-laced China ballots in 2020 ‘audit’ effort

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      Arizona Republicans are examining whether there is bamboo fiber in ballots that were used in the 2020 election, an activist assisting with the ongoing audit of the ballots told reporters this week. The latest claim underscores how rightwing conspiracy theories continue to fuel doubt about the results of the results.“There’s accusation that 40,000 ballots were flown in to Arizona and it was stuffed into the box and it came from the south-east part of the world, Asia, and what they’re doing is to find out whether there’s bamboo in the paper,” John Brakey, a longtime election audit advocate, told reporters.John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit of the 2020 Arizona election, says auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40K ballots from Asia were smuggled here. #AzAuditPool pic.twitter.com/57UOBYIehg— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) May 5, 2021
      Brakey told reporters he didn’t personally believe auditors would find bamboo fibers.“I do think it’s somewhat of a waste of time, but it will help unhinge people,” Brakey said on Wednesday. “They’re not gonna find bamboo … If they do, I think we need to know, don’t you?”The search for bamboo fibers illustrates how the latest GOP audit of all 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, home to a majority of Arizona voters, is elevating absurd claims about the 2020 election. After election day, rightwing activists falsely claimed that China had imported ballots to tip the election for Biden and that those ballots could be identified because there was bamboo in the paper. Earlier, workers were using UV lights to examine ballots; while the purpose of doing so was never clear, there was a conspiracy theory after the election that Trump had watermarked ballots (the UV examinations have stopped).There are about a dozen tables on the audit floor at Veterans Memorial Coliseum where auditors are taking pictures of ballots and then running them under microscopic cameras that are supposed to provide high-quality images of the ballots. Those images are supposed to help auditors verify the authenticity of the ballots by allowing them to examine fibers, as well as folds in the paper and ink marks on ballots.Experts have expressed concern about whether this method is a reliable way of identifying fraud.Ken Bennett, the liaison between the auditors and the Arizona senate, said in an interview he wasn’t sure if auditors were looking for bamboo fibers specifically.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletter“I think that’s more of a euphemism for saying ‘we’re looking for everything related to the paper so that we can verify that the ballots are authentic,’” he told the Guardian. “They’re looking for folds in the paper. They’re looking for where the ovals are marked, is there a little bit of an indentation or was the mark made by a Xerox machine? It’s just kind of a general expression for ‘we’re checking the paper and the folds and everything to make sure that these are authentic ballots.’”The comment came amid increasing scrutiny of the audit, which many experts say is not credible and will only further undermine confidence in the 2020 race. The justice department sent a letter to the Arizona senate president, Karen Fann, on Wednesday expressing concern that the audit may be running afoul of federal laws regarding ballot custody and voter intimidation (during a separate part of the audit, workers will reportedly knock on voters’ door to confirm their 2020 vote).Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s top election official, sent a letter to Bennett on Wednesday expressing concern over how the audit is being run. She claimed that auditors did not have a clear process for tallying ballots, left laptops unattended, and clear procedures were not in place to hire unbiased counters. “Either do it right, or don’t do it at all,” she wrote.One of the people who spread the lie about China dumping ballots, according to Slate, was Javon Pulitzer, a treasure hunter and inventor, who is reportedly assisting with the Maricopa county audit. Though it’s not clear in what capacity Pulitzer is assisting, Brakey told reporters on Tuesday that the machines capturing the microscopic images of the ballots were linked to Pulitzer. “This guy is nuts,” he said. “He’s a fraudster … It’s ridiculous that we’re doing some of this.” More