Fifteen minutes before Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was to appear on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on March 30, 2021—hours after a bomb threat that he was being investigated for alleged sex trafficking of a minor—Gaetz yelled repeatedly, at FBI agents at his childhood home. .
“Do you have an order to be here?” Gaetz screamed, according to an FBI report of the event obtained by The Daily Beast.
But as hostile as Gaetz was in those moments, the officers weren’t after him. They were actually there to help him, and his father, who had been collaborating with the FBI for several days in a covert operation that Gaetz claimed would be on live TV minutes later, would clear his name.
Bombshell Letter: Gaetz paid for underage sex, says Wingman
This scene and others are detailed in previously unreported documents that shed new light on the covert operation Gaetz helped orchestrate in the frenzied days before. The New York Times published the explosive report that changed the public and political life of the Panhandle congressman.
The documents, in the possession of federal prosecutors and obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast, corroborate parts of the story of international intrigue and attempted fraud that Gaetz described to Carlson minutes after the agents left his home. But the data also contradicts the fundamental claims in Gaetz’s version of events, raising new questions about the congressman’s own role, as well as when and why he began collaborating with the FBI.
One document contains an important yet elusive detail about the origins of the ongoing federal sex trafficking investigation into Gaetz: when, exactly, it started.
When Gaetz first told the story to Carlson, in front of an unprepared audience still digesting the news of the sex trafficking investigation, it was a dizzying sequence of events.
According to Gaetz, two men approached his father – Don Gaetz, the wealthy former Florida Senate president and to this day a political power broker – with a bizarre return: If Don Gaetz gave them $25 million, they would investigate the investigation. his son’s alleged sex crimes disappear.
The stated motivation for the $25 million payment was perhaps even more bizarre. The men said they wanted to use the money to rescue Bob Levinson, an American held hostage in Iran and long presumed dead.
“Our family was so troubled by this that we went to the local FBI,” Gaetz told Carlson.
But FBI records dispute that sequence of events.
According to the documents, the FBI learned independently of the Levinson plot through intermediaries. Agents only spoke to Matt Gaetz after contacting him through one of those intermediaries.
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Gaetz also mutilated the story in other ways, telling Carlson without proof that this was all a “deep state” plot against him. He alleged the allegations in the Time report somehow emerged from the same plot. But that logic didn’t hold. The Gaetz probe was several months old, according to the documents. The FBI investigation into the Levinson plot had just begun a few days ago.
When the Fox News segment was over, a stunned Carlson called it “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever had.” However, Gaetz eventually achieved a measure of justification when one of the men central to the hostage plan, convicted felon Stephen M. Alford, admitted last November that he had committed fraud in connection with that plot.
Yet the data contradicts Gaetz more than confirms his sequence of events.
According to the documents, Gaetz had his first meeting with the FBI on March 19, when he told agents that his father had already met the two men — Alford and another associate — the day before to discuss their offer in person.
It was not, as Gaetz had claimed, that his family contacted the FBI to discuss a possible racketeering scheme. According to that FBI special agent’s field report in the documents, the agent learned of the plot earlier that day when a retired Jacksonville agent gave her a lead.
The active agent followed that lead to another former FBI agent — this one in Miami — who told her about Levinson’s plan. The men who made the offer, said this Miami agent, claimed to have “information about Congressman Gaetz.” (The report also clarifies that the Miami agent’s tip did not come directly from Gaetz.)
When the FBI finally contacted Matt Gaetz by phone, he claimed that his father had two face-to-face meetings with the men the previous day to discuss their plan. Alford was brought in for the second meeting, Matt Gaetz noted, promising “to make Congressman GAETZ’s criminal case go away.”
At the end of the phone call, Gaetz asked the FBI agent to call his father.
Contact between the Gaetzes and Alford ended without a deal. And on March 25, a week after meeting Alford, Don Gaetz was in the FBI’s Fort Walton Beach office with his attorney and two special agents. A report of the meeting shows the officers flipping through a PowerPoint-supported strategy session designed to restart Levinson negotiations and stab the alleged perpetrators.
Convicted con man charged with attempting to pay rep Matt Gaetz and father for $25 million
In that meeting, Don Gaetz mentioned the investigation about his son. He told the pair that he heard third-hand that a former Justice Department attorney involved in Levinson’s plan had brought up the investigation in conversation. When officers inquired further, Don Gaetz’s attorney intervened and referred them to Matt Gaetz’s attorney.
Matt Gaetz — whose campaign paid $5,000 to Trump whisperer and infamous “deep state” antagonist Roger Stone for strategic consultations the day before his father’s meeting with the FBI — would days later call that former DOJ attorney a “deep state.” bogeyman in his Carlson appearance.
The next day, March 26, Don Gaetz surreptitiously recorded a personal interview with Alford’s attorney, the former DOJ attorney mentioned above. He later recorded another conversation with Alford himself, where Alford promised a presidential pardon for his son.
Then, according to the records, Don Gaetz met with a special agent at a Publix supermarket in Niceville, Florida, around 2:30 p.m. March 30, to receive a recording device for a follow-up interview with Alford the following day. hours later, The New York Times announced the investigation into sex trafficking in Gaetz.
That evening—around 7:45 p.m., according to the FBI report—two special agents called at the Gaetz home. They had come for their recording device. The sting was out, but the data doesn’t explain why, and they don’t list the… Time story.
After Don Gaetz handed them the recording device, the agents asked if they could take pictures of his text messages with Alford, according to FBI records of the incident. Don Gaetz “voluntarily” handed over his phone, and while an officer snapped a photo of a text, Matt Gaetz “appeared outside from another part of the residence.”
“M. GAETZ yelled, ‘He’s got a lawyer!’ several times,” the report says. The agent handed the phone back to Don Gaetz and they agreed to contact his attorney.
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As the officers walked back to their vehicle, according to the document, “M. GAETZ yelled, ‘Do you have an order to be here?’” and asked his father if they had taken anything from him. The officers did not respond, the report says. Don Gaetz answered his son: no, they only took the recording device they had given him earlier.
Minutes later, Matt Gaetz was on national television with a broad crackdown on the men he still claims extorted his family, all the while describing a series of events that FBI records said were false.
A Gaetz spokesperson told The Daily Beast that Gaetz stands behind his version of events.
“Representative. Matt Gaetz stands behind every word he has said about this fiasco. Time has only confirmed his claims and has resulted in the admission of guilt by one of the people involved in a shakedown of his family,” the spokesperson said. “Due to ongoing investigations of other people involved in this shakedown, we will not comment further.”
It’s unclear why Gaetz, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee and oversees the Justice Department, would attempt to disclose a supposedly ongoing and previously unreported investigation. Three people familiar with the events denied there was an investigation and the FBI declined to comment. The Daily Beast could only confirm that one of the individuals involved is currently under investigation: Matt Gaetz.
While the ongoing investigation has progressed with little action of late, government records provide new insight into when that investigation started.
According to previous news reports, the DOJ, led by Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, launched its investigation in the “final months of the Trump administration.” But the FBI documents more narrowly attribute the start of the investigation to the “summer of 2020.”
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DOJ records obtained by The Daily Beast show the investigation was opened specifically in August 2020 — the same month the FBI charged Gaetz’s former “wingman” Joel Greenberg for allegedly sex trafficking the teen at the center of the Gaetz investigation.
In the end, only one man – Alford – pleaded guilty to the pardon-for-hostage plan, admitting last November that he committed fraud once. The charges could reach up to 20 years and Alford is currently awaiting sentencing in the Santa Rosa County Jail. At the end of April, the court moved his sentencing date to June 1 for reasons that are still not clear.
On Monday, a federal judge in Florida’s mid-district also postponed Greenberg’s conviction for a third time. Greenberg, who pleaded guilty to the human trafficking charges a year ago, is now expected to be sentenced in August. According to the judge, the postponement was ‘in the interest of justice’.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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