Thread by @MotherJones

Back in 2019, we profiled Rep. Matt Gaetz. Here are some fun/terrible things we found out about him.

It’s a bit of a long thread.

First, you should know that Gaetz is from a place called Niceville, a town of about 15,000 nestled on Choctaw­hatchee Bay, just off the Gulf of Mexico. The Gaetzes owned a second home, in the nearby town of Seaside. The Truman Show was filmed in their house.

If anyone is responsible for Gaetz’s rise to political fame, it’s his dad, Don Gaetz, whose deep pockets and even deeper connections in Florida politics are one reason Matt is known in his district as Baby Gaetz.

In 2000, when Matt was a high school senior, Don ran for Okaloosa County school superintendent. One of Don’s opponents was the principal of Matt’s high school. Matt wore a “Gaetz for Superintendent” T-shirt to school almost every day until his father prevailed in the election.

In 2008, Gaetz was driving his dad’s BMW home from a nightclub on Okaloosa Island when a sheriff’s deputy pulled him over for speeding. The sheriff’s deputy smelled alcohol and asked Gaetz to take a field sobriety and breath test. Gaetz refused, so the deputy arrested him.

Gaetz’s lawyer succeeded in getting the charges dropped a few months later. In the interim, the deputy was forced to resign after the sheriff’s department said he’d used excessive force in a different arrest.

The firing had nothing to do with Gaetz, but combined with Gaetz’s narrow escape from criminal charges, the incident reinforced his local reputation as an “entitled ne’er-do-well,” as one local paper described him.

(Gaetz’s driving record is the subject of many jokes in his district. In 2014, he rear-ended one of his constituents while talking on his cellphone.)

In 2010, he won a seat in the Florida House and introduced aggressive bills to speed up executions, impose mandatory 50-year sentences for some rape convictions, ban abortion coverage in private insurance plans offered through Obamacare, and allow guns to be carried openly.

When Gaetz decided to run for a seat in the US House in 2016, he was in a bit of a financial predicament: Between 2010 and 2016, his net worth had dwindled from nearly $1 million to $388,000, according to his financial disclosures.

Most of his money was tied up in property he owned. He had less than $90,000 in liquid assets. Yet Gaetz dumped more than $200,000 into his own campaign. It was more than half his net worth and exceeded any of his opponents’ total fundraising.

Where did he come up with all that money? The obvious suspect was his dad. It would have been illegal for Don Gaetz to lend six figures to the campaign, but he appears to have found a legal way to funnel money to his son’s race.

Public records and financial disclosure forms show that in early 2016, Matt Gaetz sold a house he owned for just under $100,000. Three months later, he sold several vacant lots he’d bought years earlier.

All of Gaetz’s real estate was purchased by the same buyer: a company called Treveron, which, it turns out, is owned by his dad.

The real estate sales weren’t the only unusual features of his congressional fundraising. While in the Florida House, he had started and chaired two leadership PACs, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars that he used to influence races for local offices.

When he ran for Congress, he resigned from the PACs, which then shut down and donated all their remaining money, about $380,000, to a federal super-PAC called North Florida Neighbors, dedicated to supporting Matt Gaetz for Congress.

The super-PAC and the state PACs listed the same treasurer, and the state PACs were chaired by the wife of a former chief of staff to Don Gaetz.

In Congress, Gaetz became one of Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. When Trump called Haiti a “shithole” country in January 2018, Gaetz took to the airwaves to concur that Haiti was “deplorable,” full of “sheet metal and garbage.”

When he was Trump's guest at the 2018 SOTU address, Gaetz brought a conspiracy theorist who had questioned whether the Nazis actually used gas chambers.

Gaetz also hired a speechwriter who had been forced out of the White House because of his association with white nationalists.

Virtually everything Gaetz has done in Congress has been designed for maximum publicity. The first bill he ever introduced, for instance, was a one-sentence measure disbanding the Environmental Protection Agency.

In July 2017, he hijacked a Democratic resolution seeking more information about Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey by attaching an amendment calling for an investigation into Comey’s “refusal to investigate” Hillary Clinton.

.@WIRED later discovered that a Gaetz staffer had crowdsourced ideas for the amendment on the Reddit forum /r/the_Donald, a cesspool of alt-right activity.

There is one thing, however, that Gaetz would prefer to keep out of the media: his love life.

In 2017, a former staffer sent him a blunt text message about a 21-year-old woman Gaetz was dating, who would later become a Democratic congressional intern, urging him to ask the woman to delete photos of him from her Instagram account.

The staffer wrote, “Don’t be surprised if many [conservatives]…may frown upon her sexually explicit images, her videos showcasing her multiple capabilities to smoke weed, and her flagrant application of language as antithetical to the values of Northwest Florida.”

Gaetz declined multiple requests for an interview for our profile, but one day, he called @smencimer to beg us not to identify his exes. “I am pleading with you not to identify them,” he said. “Identifying puts them at risk.” He added, “I’m not a monk. I’m just a congressman.”

Read more in @smencimer’s in-depth story: bit.ly/39ttH7a