President-elect Donald Trump‘s plans to have Matt Gaetz as his attorney general collapsed Thursday when the former congressman withdrew his name from consideration.
Trump shocked the nation last week when he chose Gaetz to lead the Justice Department. The Florida Republican was a surprise pick, given his limited experience as a lawyer and because he was the subject of a federal sex trafficking investigation that concluded after the Biden administration declined to bring charges in 2022.
Gaetz’s nomination was controversial with members of both sides of the aisle and brought renewed attention to the House Ethics Committee investigation into the allegations of sexual abuse and illicit drug use against him. The Republican members of the panel voted to block the release of its report on Wednesday.
Mark Peterson/Getty Images
What happened to Gaetz’s nomination?
CNN said Gaetz’s decision to remove himself from consideration came within an hour after the network reached out to him for comment on new reporting. According to CNN, the woman who claims she had sex with Gaetz as a minor told the ethics committee that she had not one but two sexual encounters with him, the second time including an adult woman.
Gaetz said in his announcement that he was withdrawing because his confirmation had “unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”
In a statement responding to the news, Trump said he “greatly appreciated” Gaetz’s recent efforts and that he respected him for not wanting to be a “distraction for the Administration.” The president-elect will now have to select someone else to lead the Justice Department.
Is Todd Blanche next up?
A favorite to replace Gaetz as the attorney general nominee is Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal defense lawyer. Blanche, who famously represented the president-elect during his Manhattan criminal hush-money trial, has already been nominated by Trump as the new deputy attorney general. So, elevating Trump from the second-ranking DOJ official to the top of the chain could be a natural move.
In the hush-money trial, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to conceal payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the days leading up to the 2016 presidential election in exchange for her silence about an alleged 2006 sexual encounter.
Prior to joining Trump’s legal team, Blanche was a federal prosecutor well experienced in white-collar defense cases. After earning his doctor of law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 2003, he joined New York’s Southern District, helping to lead the violent crimes unit.
He later joined Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, where he became a partner and represented Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign chairman who was sentenced to prison for various financial crimes, and Igor Fruman, an associate of former Trump lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He left the firm and founded Blanche Law to represent Trump earlier this year.
As deputy attorney general, Blanche would manage the department’s day-to-day functions and serve as an adviser to the attorney general.
Blanche isn’t the only defense lawyer nominated by Trump to a position in his administration. Emil Bove, who played the other central role in the hush-money case, was chosen as the next principal associate deputy attorney general, and John Sauer, who successfully represented Trump before the U.S. Supreme Court in the presidential immunity case, has been selected as solicitor general.
But while Blanche is being viewed by politicos as the next AG, Polymarket, the predictive betting website funded in part by early Trump backer Peter Thiel, does not have Blanche as the front-runner. Blanche has a 27 percent chance of becoming the next attorney general, according to the platform, his odds dropping from 32 percent right after Gaetz’s announcement.
Who else is in the running for AG?
Jay Clayton, who served as the chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission during the first Trump administration, is the top pick on Polymarket with a 47 percent chance of being tapped as the next attorney general. Less than a week ago, Trump announced that he would nominate Clayton to be the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Also leading on Polymarket are Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Moments after the news of Gaetz’s withdrawal, former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told CNN’s Dana Bash that Trump is looking for an attorney general “who’s going to be loyal, who’s going to have his back, who’s going to understand what [he] wants to get done.”
Bailey, Lee and Paxton are all Trump loyalists.
Before Gaetz was chosen as the nominee, Bailey was reportedly a front-runner for the position. He unsuccessfully attempted to intervene in Trump’s Manhattan criminal case earlier this year to halt the president-elect’s sentencing. His high-profile cases as Missouri AG include the lawsuits against the Biden administration over its federal student loan forgiveness program and its alleged collusion with social media companies to censor conservative speech.
Bailey was reelected to a full term earlier this month. He has held office since November 2022, when Missouri Governor Mike Parson appointed him to fill the vacancy left when Eric Schmitt was elected to the Senate. Polymarket gives Bailey a 16 percent chance of becoming the next attorney general.
Lee has a 14 percent chance of replacing Gaetz, according to the betting platform. The senator was one of the top names for attorney general before Gaetz’s nomination. Lee worked closely with Trump in the wake of his 2020 election loss, having voiced in text messages to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that he offered his “unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal.”
Paxton is also close to the president-elect, having accompanied Trump in the courtroom during his trial in New York and waged an unsuccessful challenge to Trump’s 2020 loss in four battleground states. Trump first floated Paxton as his attorney general in May, when he called the Texas Republican “a very talented guy” whom he would consider to lead the DOJ during a second Trump administration. Polymarket has Paxton with a 12 percent chance.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
