Rep. Matt Gaetz is sorry. Really, really, really, really sorry that he sent out a tweet brazenly threatening Donald Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, ahead of his testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.
Almost immediately after he hit the magic send button on that tweet, the backlash was swift, as legal experts and former prosecutors began to note that this seemed to be the very definition of felony witness tampering, at a minimum. Questions began to swirl, the most important being, who gave this Florida congressman damaging information about a lawyer from New York City?
It didn’t take long before Nancy Pelosi tweeted a warning to all members of Congress about their social media conduct. Between likely talking to a lawyer and Pelosi’s public warning, the arrogant Florida congressman publicly apologized and did a walk back for the ages.
Here are Pelosi’s tweet and Gaetz’s really, really sorry response.
Nice try, buddy, but Congress should still investigate what seemed like a crystal clear effort to threaten and intimidate a witness testifying to Congress about federal crimes. Gaetz will be lucky if he isn’t under an official Ethics Committee investigation by lunch on Wednesday.
For the record, Gaetz has previously apologized for bringing a notable Holocaust denier to the State of the Union in 2018 and for appearing as a guest on the conspiracy-promoting InfoWars with Alex Jones.
And while the deplorable Matt Gaetz may have deleted the threatening tweet, we didn’t.
At a bare minimum, Gaetz should be censured by the United States Congress. If Republicans had any integrity whatsoever, they would be stripping him of committee assignments or demanding he resign outright immediately. This conduct cannot be ignored and cannot go unpunished.
