OK, Who's Writing The Matt Gaetz Screenplay, Because This Sh*t Is WILD
Let's assume for the moment that the documents leaked to the Washington Examiner are real, since no one involved has come forward to say they're forged. It's as good a starting place as any, right?
According to the Examiner, the federal investigation into Gaetz's relationship with a teenage girl had been underway for months when his father, Don Gaetz, was approached by a former Air Force intelligence officer named Bob Kent and his attorney, David McGee, with a harebrained scheme to free an American hostage held in Iran and clear the congressman's name.
"I would like to talk to you immediately about the current federal investigation and the indictment that is about to be filed against your son," the March 16 text reads. "I have a plan that can make his future legal and political problems go away."
Kent and McGee have been working for years to free Robert Levinson, a CIA operative who went missing in Iran in 2007. The US government has told his family that Levinson is dead, but Kent claims to have more recent proof of life. When Don Gaetz met with Kent and McGee the next day, they allegedly presented him with a typed memo which began with a detailed description of his son's legal problems, with references to "compromising pictures depicting Congressman Gaetz and an Election Official involved in a 'sexual orgy with underage prostitutes', in Maitland, Florida," which "has resulted in Congressman Gaetz becoming a target of a widening investigation into serious underage sex trafficking, political corruption, public integrity, and other Criminal allegations against Congressman Gaetz and others."
"A Grand Jury has been impaneled, in the Middle District of Florida, to determine whether criminal charges shall be brought against Congressman Gaetz and others," it continues. "It has been confirmed that at least one underage female has testified to the Grand Jury that Congressman Gaetz has paid her to engage in sexual activities."
But never fear, these randos have a solution to all the congressman's problems!
"Our strategy for Congressman Gaetz to mitigate his legal, and political, troubles would be for him, or someone else, to arrange for the funds required to obtain the immediate release of Robert Levinson from captivity in Iran," they wrote.
The "plan," dubbed "Project Homecoming," appeared to go like this:
- Step 1: Poppy Gaetz "loans" the schemers $25 million;
- Step 2: Schemers pay $25 million to Iran and secure Levinson's release;
- Step 3: Matt Gaetz is "on the plane" when Levinson comes home;
- Step 4: Gaetz is a hero;
- Step 5: President Biden disappears Gaetz's legal problems, since heroes are allowed to have sex with minors;
- Step 6: Schemers collect $25 million reward from US government for Levinson's release;
- Step 7: Schemers pay Poppy Gaetz back for his "loan" and promise never to mention it again;
- Step 8: ALIENS!!!!!
The Examiner has emails apparently from the FBI confirming Don Gaetz's claim that he wore a wire during at least one meeting with the schemers. They've also got a photo of a business card from a guy named Stephen Alford, a Florida businessman who served ten years on a fraud conviction, whom Gaetz claims was at the meeting. But it's not clear if the illegal conduct here is extortion of the Gaetz family or some other violation of sanctions laws. It's also not clear how these geniuses thought Poppy Gaetz was going to move $25 million into the lawyer's escrow account by March 19 — i.e. in three days — without leaving a paper trail that would inevitably lead to the whole stupid caper becoming public.
What is clear, however, is that Rep. Gaetz's legal problems occurred long before these desperate idiots put the squeeze on his father. This is not, as Gaetz would have us believe, one unified, dastardly plot to shut him up because "we are in an era of our politics now Tucker, where people are smeared to try to take them out of the conversation."
The feds were investigating Gaetz's pal Joel Greenberg, the Seminole County tax collector awaiting trial on a raft of charges including embezzlement and paying minors for sex. And some sort of way that investigation led them to Gaetz's door.
Equally clear is that Gaetz's strategy to salvage his political career by talking about his legal problems with every reporter in DC is really fucking stupid when it comes to his legal defense.
"My hope is that the truth will set me free, so I'm trying to get as much truth out as possible," he told Politico yesterday, after having confirmed that he did in fact ferry women across state lines for sex. Which makes it a lot easier for the government to simply enter some poor girl's birth certificate into evidence, since Gaetz has more or less copped to the other elements of the crime. (Yes, it's more complicated than that. But still!)
Gaetz's pals in Congress are sticking by him for the time being, but his obnoxious antics and total lack of interest in the work of governing have hardly endeared him to his colleagues.
Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is so far ignoring Democratic demands to yank Gaetz from the Judiciary Committee, but appears open to cutting him loose if the investigation goes any further, telling NBC, "DOJ has not told me anything. If a member at my conference gets indicted, they will get removed from a committee. He says this is not true. And we have a newspaper report that says something else. We'll find out the basis."
Meanwhile, the congressman's parachute into private life seems to have sprung a leak. On Tuesday, Axios reported that Gaetz was thinking of noping out of Congress for a sweet gig at Newsmax or another conservative outlet. He confirmed as much yesterday to the Daily Beast, saying, "There is not a single conservative television station I haven't had a passing conversation with about life after Congress. I have neither received nor solicited offers from any of them. But yes, I've talked to either executives, producers or hosts at Newsmax, OAN, Fox, Fox Business, Real America's Voice and probably others I'm forgetting in this moment as I focus intently on refuting false accusations against me."
But even wingnut welfare is denying Gaetz's application.
"No one with any level of authority has had conversations with Matt Gaetz for any of our platforms and we have no interest in hiring him," a Fox spox told the Beast.
"Right now, I'm not really hiring anybody for talk shows," said OAN's CEO Robert Herring.
"Highly doubt it, highly," Newsmax sources said, when Beast reporters asked if Gaetz would be joining the network.
Womp womp. And also, CRIPES, COULD THIS SHIT GET ANY WEIRDER?
We'll keep you posted.
[WashEx / Gaetz Docs / Beast]
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Tucker Had A Weird One Last Night
The clip above starts out so well, with a question America really can agree on: "In what version of quote meritocracy can someone like Chuck Todd get rich and famous? Dumb and conventional now passes as impressive? It's insulting." And for the first time in our lives, we looked at Tucker Carlson and said, "OK, with you so far!"
But then the worm turned, and Tucker somehow made his way to whining that white supremacists and QAnon people aren't welcome in the Democrat Media Complex's Big Tent. According to known truth seeker Tucker Carlson, all the media that is not Fox is just paid to lie constantly. (About Tucker Carlson, remember, a real judge noted that Fox News lawyers had argued "persuasively" to her that "any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statements he makes.")
Tucker then played clips of people on MSNBC saying nice things about Kamala Harris, which are all, we guess, to Tucker, just factcheck false. We don't know if it's because Vice President Harris is Black, but we're trying to have an appropriate amount of skepticism about the statements he makes, like the judge told us.
This led to Tucker playing a clip of CNN's Don Lemon being genuinely overjoyed after the election, which we guess was also a mainstream media lie, in response to which Tucker bitched that white supremacists and QAnon aren't included in the Big Tent. Totally normal Tucker commentary!
How about this Tucker quote from last night?
TUCKER CARLSON: Once again, COVID restrictions aren't just about COVID. Any more than Donald Trump's impeachment was just about Donald Trump or BLM's ongoing campaign to end the nuclear family was ever about George Floyd.
Oh boy. Everything's a conspiracy, isn't it, Tucker? COVID restrictions aren't about keeping people safe, they're about fascist control. Trump's impeachment wasn't about Trump, it was about ... who knows, "cancel culture" probably. And for white racists, Black Lives Matter is a conspiracy to destroy the nuclear (white) family. Gotcha. To be clear, the "Black Lives Matter wants to destroy the nuclear family" thing is one of the racist right's Big Lies about BLM, relying on one out-of-context quote that used to be on its website. To believe this particular lie, we think you need to be pretty willfully ignorant and racist.
Sometimes Tucker doesn't say the quiet parts loud by himself. Sometimes he lets one of his guests do it. Here is Heather Mac Donald, who is ... some right-wing asshole, doesn't matter ... proffering what she thinks is a gotcha "own the libs!" question from an op-ed she recently published in Newsweek. (This was actually Monday night, but it's insane, so fuck it.)
HEATHER MAC DONALD: On the one hand as Biden said during the campaign, as he said in his inauguration speech, as he said since then: America is lethally racist, on the other hand we should break down every single reasonable, common sensical immigration control in order to bring in legally and illegally as many third world immigrants of color as possible. Both positions cannot be true. If Biden believes that Black children are at risk of getting shot every time they step outside, we should not be bringing more Black children into this country. This is an opportunity for Republicans, Tucker, to call them out on this.
Wait, what is the opportunity for Republicans, Tucker, to call them out on? To keep Black immigrant children out of America? To OWN THE LIBS by saying that if America is so racist, why can't we keep all these Black immigrant kids out of America, for their own safety, obviously? Heather Mac Donald is a conservative "think tank" person, and this is just some really clever "thinking." Because in the conservative squirrel brain, liberals couldn't possibly both think America is full of systemic racism and also want to fix it and make it as safe as possible for Black immigrant children coming to America for a better life than what they had before.
Fuck it, it's just white supremacist bullshit, no reason to try to diagram their sentences.
Finally, and back to Tuesday, it wouldn't be Tucker Carlson if it didn't just go weird as hell at some point. Tucker has a new obvious projection conspiracy theory about Joe and Jill Biden's marriage. Did you know their marriage, and their obvious love and affection for each other, are not real, but just rather an elaborate 44-year-long PR stunt? That is a reasonable thing to believe, maybe, if you were not hugged as a child and have never experienced real intimacy or touched your marital spouse's genitals, allegedly:
"Their love is as real as climate change" Tucker Carlson's newest bizarre take is that Jill and Joe Bidens' 44-yea… https://t.co/eHQ8t35Mmp— Kat Abu (@Kat Abu) 1613524561.0
TUCKER: At the heart of this great American family is a love story. One man, one woman, and the fires of passion that changed the course of our history! Not since Antony dined with Cleopatra in downtown Antioch — before they killed themselves obviously — has a country witnessed a love story as moving as poignant as Jill and Joe's. No, ladies and gentlemen, Jill Biden is not Joe's caretaker, she isn't his nurse. She is his fully equal romantic partner. Together they are like besotted teens, yet at the same time they are the wise and knowing parents of a nation. [...]
So it's official, the Bidens' affection is totally real. It's in no way part of a slick PR campaign devised by cynical consultants determined to hide the president's senility by misdirection. [Right here Tucker's voice shrieks up a few octaves, like it does.] Not at all! Their love is as real as climate change!
Spoken by a true guy who's never actually been around two old people who've been together forever who are in love. Guess Black Lives Matter destroyed all the nuclear families Tucker had growing up. (Allegedly.)
Wonkette will have more on this new obviously very true story about the Bidens' obviously fake sham marriage later today, because just like Tucker said above, the media lies constantly and makes up fake love stories about the Bidens, while ignoring the consistently lusty heat between Donald and Melania Trump.
Donald Trump No GIF by Election 2020Giphy
Yep.
[Media Matters / ibid. / ibid.]
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