Lisa Desjardins:
Let’s talk about two in particular for the Department of Defense and attorney general.
Let’s start there with Matt Gaetz, the controversial nominee for attorney general. We know a little bit more about him. A Florida attorney says he is representing two young women who saw Gaetz having a sexual encounter with a woman who was 17. Gaetz himself has denied any wrongdoing. He’s saying he has been politically persecuted and targeted in all of this.
But there is an update on the House ethics report for that long investigations of the House had on this exact incident. That committee meets this week, and the chair of that committee, a Republican, has said that Speaker Johnson, who has said he didn’t doesn’t want them to release the report, he said that that word shouldn’t affect the committee’s decision.
Will it or won’t it? We don’t know. But the ranking Democrat on that committee, Susan Wild, has said it should be released. They are going to decide this week whether it will be publicly released.
Now, let’s talk about the Department of Defense nominee, Pete Hegseth. There, separately, a lawyer for him has said that he did pay a woman a settlement after they had a sexual encounter. That lawyer says it was consensual. But we also know that he was investigated as a part of this for sexual assault, but never charged in that case.
Now, we raise this because now senators are raising it as well. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin has said that this could derail that nomination.
And just in the past few minutes, there’s a news on a third nomination, the Department of Transportation. We know that president-elect Donald Trump says he is nominating Sean Duffy. he is a FOX News contributor, also a former prosecutor and someone well-known on social media.
