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Ethics Committee Report Finds Evidence Gaetz Paid 17-Year-Old For Sex; Gaetz Suggests He May Run For Florida Senator Or Governor; Biden Commutes Most Federal Death Row Sentences To Life In Prison; Biden: I Cannot Stand Back And Let A New Administration Resume Executions That I Halted; Trump Threatens To Seize Control Of Panama Canal. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired December 23, 2024 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[12:00:00]

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: Today on INSIDE POLITICS, prostitution, illicit drug use, statutory rape. The House Ethics Committee says it found evidence that Matt Gaetz committed multiple crimes while he was a sitting member of Congress. We'll break down the bombshell report and what comes next for the close Trump ally.

Plus, Christmas commutations. President Biden moves 37 federal prisoners off death row. It's a remarkable transformation for a man who was once a champion of capital punishment.

And exit stage center, Joe Manchin leaves Washington after 15 years as one of the Senate's most indispensable members. He's not going quietly telling, our Manu Raju why the Democratic Party's brand became, quote, "toxic," and how it can recover from a crushing defeat.

I'm Phil Mattingly. Let's go behind the headlines and INSIDE POLITICS. We begin with the breaking news. The House Ethics Committee has released its final report into Matt Gaetz, the former Florida Congressman and President-elect Trump's first pick for attorney general. The Committee says it found evidence that Gaetz paid a 17 year old girl for sex and violated multiple Florida state laws.

The panel also found evidence to use cocaine and ecstasy on multiple occasions while serving as a member of Congress. CNN's Katelyn Polantz has been digging through this report now that it's public. Katelyn, what are you finding?

KATELYN POLANTZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Phil, that section about Matt Gaetz and sex with the underage girl, that captures a lot of what the Committee was looking into here. Just some of the facts that they were able to find, not only through documented evidence, but also interviews with more than half a dozen witnesses, including the victim, the girl or the woman who was 17 years old heading into her senior year of high school at the time.

She told the Committee, under with testimony, that she had sex with Matt Gaetz, then a sitting member of Congress twice during a party in July of 2017, including at least once in the presence of other party attendees. She recalled receiving $400 in cash from Matt Gaetz, which she understood to be payment for sex, and she had just completed her junior year of high school.

The Committee also looked at several other relationships that Gaetz had with women -- not underage women, women who were adults at the time, but many of them told the Committee that they did have an understanding that Gaetz was reimbursing them in some way for sex.

So that led the Committee to find that the Congressman, while he was in Congress, was engaged in commercial sex, that would be prostitution, giving money to women, also statutory rape that is the allegations related to the underage girl and then also illicit drug use.

The way the Committee phrases it at the top of this report is that they determined there is substantial evidence that represented Gaetz violated House rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.

This report is now out publicly. Matt Gaetz had run to the court system this morning to try and block the release of the report, but the House has posted it online as well as some of the evidence they've gathered. And he, both in court and then also on X, has been saying repeatedly that these allegations are false and reminding people he has not been charged with any crime.

MATTINGLY: That's Katelyn Polantz for us. And to Katelyn's final point there, Gaetz has vehemently denied the allegations. He's called his behavior, quote, "embarrassing," but not criminal. This morning, he reacted on X saying, quote, "Giving funds to someone you are dating that they didn't ask for and that isn't charged for sex is now prostitution?!?

There is a reason. They did this to me on a in a Christmas Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses."

Joining me now, my excellent panel of reporters, Jasmine Wright of NOTUS, Semafor Dave Weigel, Hans Nichols of Axios, and Politico's Olivia Beavers.

And, Olivia, I want to start with you. You live in this world and not necessarily the world described in the report, I don't think. But on Capitol Hill with Matt Gaetz over the course of the last several years, this is now public. What does this mean going forward, I guess?

OLIVIA BEAVERS, CONGRESSIONAL REPORTER, POLITICO: Well, I think, one, we're all wondering what this means for his career moving forward. We -- a lot of Republicans believe he was eyeing a gubernatorial run when Ron DeSantis' term limited out. He floated himself for Marco Rubio's, Senate seat that he's expected to vacate if he's confirmed, into the incoming Trump administration. A lot of the contours of this report, we had heard rumors and allegations of, but to see them in print, they're pretty damning. They say they found substantial evidence of him sleeping with a 17-year-old of him, you know, do going to these parties where women had been sort of recruited by one of his associates on SeekingArrangements.com, where at the very least women were expected to be paid for companionship, but in other cases, for sex.

[12:05:00]

And so, I think that you're seeing Gaetz already online trying to do some damage control. He's tweeting and trying to undermine what the Committee found and also just claimed that it was weaponized against him.

Gaetz told me, when I asked for his response this morning, these claims will be destroyed in court, which is why they were never made in any court against me. So, I think you're just going to be seeing the beginning of this fight.

MATTINGLY: And to the point, and you referenced something I want to play, which was, it was just yesterday at a at a Turning Point Action event down in Phoenix that Matt Gaetz was speaking, talked about his potential future, what he may be eyeing right now. He said this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MATT GAETZ, (R) FORMER CONGRESSMAN: My fellow Floridians have asked me to eye the governor's mansion in Tallahassee. Maybe special counsel to go after the insider trading for my former colleagues in Congress. It seems I may not have had enough support in the United States Senate. Maybe I'll just run for Marco Rubio's vacant seat in the United States Senate and join some of those folks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Dave Weigel, what is the future here? Because -- and we will dig more into the details of the report, in kind of Trump's era of which we are now fully ensconced in, for a second time, probably more so than the first. These types of allegations, these types of reports don't end someone's career like they may have 10 years ago.

DAVE WEIGEL, POLITICS REPORTER, SEMAFOR: No. You just said it. The context he's operating in is a Donald Trump loyalist who wants to abide by the same rules and lack of punishments that Donald Trump has abided by.

The bar is very low for career ending information if you are a Donald Trump loyalist. If you're not, it can it can be a little bit different. But if you are, you look at Hunter Biden. And when you saw Republicans, referring to that pardon, we're talking about that pardon, they often pointed to it, what was going to do the next time some MAGA Republican was in trouble.

They could say that there's one justice system for his family. There should be -- what are we to pretend there's a different justice system for us? And so, yes, it's not a problem for a lot of supporters of the president when they see somebody accused of behavior and not adjudicated. Even if it is run through corporate, if it's not adjudicated, they see the hand of the deep state invisible, whether it exists or not.

And that's why this is not -- now does everyone else who wants those jobs in Florida appreciate this information coming out, and think that they have a better chance of winning they did yesterday? They do. But they've also been through scenarios where people accused of grievous things who are tied to Donald Trump. If he puts the hand on them and says that it's OK, a lot of Republican voters say, yes. That's right. I don't believe the allegations. I don't trust the FBI. I don't trust the DOJ. They're all corrupt.

MATTINGLY: You know, to that point, Jasmine, the Biden Justice Department did not bring charges --

JASMINE WRIGHT, POLITICS REPORTER, NOTUS: Right.

MATTINGLY: -- against him, at least that we've seen. It seems like that case was wrapped. The House Ethics Committee is a bipartisan panel, which works in secret, doesn't ever want things to be coming out publicly. They voted to release this report.

And as part of this report, you know, where it says, you know, key findings, tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex and drugs on at least 20 occasions includes paying a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017. Gaetz violated Florida state laws, including statutory rape law. I mean, this a bipartisan group of members of Congress voted to release this information.

WRIGHT: Not only just bipartisan, a group of his peers, people that he worked with. Sure people that may have not liked it as much, but people who they view him as one of them. He was at least a member of the House.

I mean, I think first of all, the story that this report tells us incredibly sad for these women. Yes. A lot of them say that they consented to it, but afterwards, they had feelings of regret, feeling like they've been misled, the small amount of payments, being potentially drugged and other things like that. It's incredibly sad.

But I was talking to somebody close to Trump and they said this is the reason why he picked Matt Gaetz for the role. Because he believes that the system has been -- he, as in Trump, believes that the system has been weaponized against him and wanted somebody who felt the same way and that would tear down the systems that he felt were being used against him. But the reality is that the DOJ did not bring this case.

And in fact, according to the report, they actually didn't even work with the Committee to corroborate or to give details of the things that they learned in this report. So it's actually not the DOJ in this case that is weaponizing it. And so I think that that is a clear distinction.

But I think Dave is right. If Trump reads through this or doesn't read through it, but decides that these things are OK, then he's going to bless them. I was talking to somebody else yesterday who said, you know, maybe it's not that he runs for Rubio's seat, but maybe it's that he gets a role that doesn't need to be confirmed within the administration.

MATTINGLY: What about, you know, he resigned his seat. He also won reelection.

He retains the right to go back. Right?

MATTINGLY: Where does that stand?

HANS NICHOLS, POLITICS REPORTER, AXIOS: I know I talked to House folks who say not going to happen. Yeah, think about it. But a few days ago he reserved the right to go back. And I would defer to sort of better congressional reporters are more in constant touch and get statements from him. He's always reserved that right.

And so when you said his former colleagues, you know, my line there is once -- and once in potential future colleagues because January 3rd he can come back and be a sitting United States member of Congress.

[12:10:00]

To the broader question here of his political future. Yes, these courts -- the evidentiary standards different. Right? He would not -- the Justice Department decided apparently that they didn't have a case against him. But he's not in a court of law right now. He's in the court of public opinion.

Now you got to bifurcate that and say he's in the Republican primary court of public opinion. And yes, he's getting some backing in the Republican ecosystem. It's still an open question to me on whether or not he gets a full throated endorsement from President Trump in a primary and for even the governor's race or the open Marco Rubio seat.

And I'm just -- I'm not going to make a prediction on that. But that's what it comes down to. And then the battle is joined because we've seen some of Trump's endorsees, they don't always win. He doesn't have a magic wand to get everyone across the line. And this seems like a heavy lift.

MATTINGLY: And it's remarkable, though, when you read what's in this report, the fact that he still might possibly have a future in politics in a very real one, this is the era we're in. All right, guys, stay with me.

Coming up, President Biden is showing mercy to convicted murderers. Why he's made the decision. That's next.

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MATTINGLY: In one of his final moves before leaving office, President Biden has commuted the sentences of nearly every federal prisoner on death row. They will spend the rest of their lives in prison, but no longer face execution. Now, Biden had already halted executions on the federal level, a move that President-elect Trump plans to reverse.

This morning, Biden said in a statement, quote, "I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume the executions that I halted."

Now, to be clear, this applies only to the federal death row. Most executions in America are carried out by individual states. Our great reporters are back with me now. And Jasmine, I want to start with you because this was something that in the 2020 race, during the primary and in the general election, the president got a lot of pressure on when he was a candidate.

What's fascinating to me is if you look at kind of where the American public is on the death penalty, I want to bring up a Gallup poll kind of charting from 1994, 80 percent support for the death penalty; 2014, 63 percent; 2024, 53 percent. Now track back to that first date, 1994. And this was then Senator Biden's statement.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN: I'm a death penalty supporter. I'm the guy that wrote this bill. Presumptuous thing to say, but I wrote this bill, my own little hands. And I added into the bill more than 50 death penalties. I support the death penalty. This president supports a death penalty.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Not showing that as a got you, more as a this is the evolution. And it's not just with President Biden, we saw the kind of poll numbers.

WRIGHT: Yeah, I mean, it's a huge evolution, not just in the American public, but him as a person. And I think it's so interesting, because so much of what he has done as president, specifically on criminal justice, can be seen in the wake of his role in the crime bill, in all of the strife that he suffered in 2020 with advocates and people saying that they didn't want to vote for him because of how involved he was within that crime bill and him kind of trying to atone for that.

I know I talked to a lot of clemency advocates after he pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, and they said, you know, actually, we don't really care about Hunter Biden, but what we do care about is the low amount of clemencies that he so far passed and him not living up to his promise in 2020 that he would change the way that the death penalty functions, at least federally, in this country.

And so I think that this is a reaction to that pressure from activists, but certainly, I mean, not just the person, Joe Biden, the difference between that clip and what we see now, but also what he has done on crime, on criminal justice. And that's going to be a huge part, I think, of his legacy going forward. MATTINGLY: A legacy that it seems like the pendulum is swinging completely away from because you have the man who will replace him in the Oval Office saying things repeatedly like this.

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DONALD TRUMP (R), FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT AND CURRENT PRESIDENTIAL- ELECT: And I'm hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.

We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on. We have to bring in the death penalty if we want to stop the infestation of drugs coming into our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTINGLY: Dave, if you watched the President-elect on the campaign trail, this was a regular kind of focal point in his remarks, no matter what. Is he represent a shifting away from where it seemed like people were on this issue?

WEIGEL: Yeah. The polling might be a lagging indicator because you look at where especially red states have been going on the death penalty. One, not rolling back, having no problem executing prisoners. Two, adding the crimes that are -- that people can be put to death for. In Florida and Tennessee, they've added these -- added it to the law that pedophilia, some sort of crimes against children, you can be subject to the death penalty.

So this has been expanding in a way it hasn't since that Biden speech in the 90s. And the crime rates are very different now. They -- and Florida are very proud of lower crime rates than the ones you see in Manhattan. Some of this is the intensity of feeling people have about the crimes they see on TV. The sense that the country is less moral than it used to be.

I should add the reason Biden talks about this now, he is a Catholic. He is an outgoing Catholic president. He's going to be replaced by administration with a Catholic vice president who has not taken the same approach here that you need to follow the church's teaching on this.

They are, I think, I'm not sure they're ahead of the curve. I can't predict the future. But the trend you've seen in the States is more openness to putting people to death. And that's why this, this Biden decision like the clemencies last week have had such a surprising angry reaction from Democrats perspective, they are where the country was maybe in 2020. It's not where the country is right now.

[12:20:00]

NICHOLS: Well look, the pendulum may be swinging. I mean 53 percent still on Trump's side. Right. If you're -- if I got your numbers right. When you -- and just Trump sort of it on this, when you talk to Republicans, especially Democrats on why Trump won, yes, it was inflation, yes it was immigration, but crime was always a subset of immigration. And Donald Trump wants to be seen as being tough on crime.

So internally, I'm sure yours is checks chains were blowing up as well. It was from Democrats this morning for me being like, you know, we've lost a couple of news cycles on this. This is -- we're learning the wrong lessons with lessons we should have learned from 2024 is to be tough on crime, tough on immigration and have an answer on some of the cultural issues.

This isn't that. With all clemency and with all commutations and any sort of pardons, they're always big 24, 48 hour stories. They don't necessarily stick. And unless anyone here wants to re litigate the Marc Rich pardon that Bill Clinton did in the waning days of his presidency, they tend not to stick that much. And remember, Donald Trump also pardoned a lot of drug dealers.

MATTINGLY: Yeah. And the three people that Biden did not pardon who are on death -- federal death row, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dylan Roof, Robert Bowers, kind of the most infamous murderers that were on, they were left off. You talk to Democrats every single day. A lot of them have been doing a lot of soul searching the last couple of weeks. Similar to what Hans was hearing.

BEAVERS: Yep. I mean, I think Democrats are still trying to figure out -- you know, but some of these issues, if they -- it doesn't look exactly good for the Boston Marathon bomber for some of these people who have done hateful crimes to suddenly be taken off with death row. I think some of it just creeps of thick issues.

But we're also probably going to be seeing more commutations, more pardons. We're hearing that preemptive pardons for those who are under threat by Donald Trump could be coming. So I don't think that this is done. And I also wanted to point out one thing about the dates that we were talking about.

In the 2000s, we started seeing more forensic evidence that undermined some of the convictions for the death sentence. So in between 1994 and the present, we started actually seeing more of a national reconsideration of why we were using the death penalty.

MATTINGLY: Yeah, it's a really good point. A really good point. There's reasons why it wasn't just kind of how people were feeling or what they were thinking at the moment.

All right, stick with us. We got a lot more to get to. Coming up, the Panama Canal or the United States Canal. Donald Trump had this to say yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America in full, quickly and without question.

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MATTINGLY: After triggering a week of chaos on Capitol Hill over keeping the government open. President-elect Trump has a new fixation, the Panama Canal, I guess. Over the weekend, the President-elect said the U.S. could take control of the canal. And on his social media platform, he wrote, quote, "Welcome to the United States Canal."

CNN Steve Contorno joins me now for more on this. Steve, just to ask the obvious question, where did this come from exactly?

STEVE CONTORNO, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Phil. I've been trying to get to the bottom of that question for the past 48 hours. And even talking to people close to the President-elect. They feel like this, this one came out of left field.

And you know as well as I do that, Trump often dines with people, business leaders, friends across the water at Mar-a-Lago, where they float ideas to him and he often will then regurgitate them in some form. And the best answer I got was that this is closely in line with his focus so far on trade and improving conditions for trade for the United States.

We've seen him also taunt Mexico and Canada with 25 percent tariffs. He has certainly provoked some of our other trade partners as well. And this is sort of in line with that. But just take a listen to what, what he had to say over the weekend, because it outlines a bit of what his concerns are with the current situation with the Panama Canal.

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TRUMP: Has anyone ever heard of the Panama Canal? Because we're being ripped off at the Panama Canal like we're being ripped off everywhere else. A secure -- he just said, take it back. That's a good idea. It was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions. You got to treat us fairly, and they haven't treated us fairly. If the principles, both moral and legal of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CONTORNO: It's so much striking to hear people cheering for that, because I imagine most people in the room didn't have an opinion on the Panama Canal prior to Trump saying that. But look, it's in line with some of the other things he has put out there lately.

He has suggested that Canada can be absorbed as the 51st state in the country. He last night revived this idea that the U.S. could acquire Greenland from Denmark, even though that country has said the idea is absurd. But so it's part and parcel, I guess, with this idea of American expansion that Trump is proposing, even as he also suggests the U.S. should be pulling back in many ways from foreign affairs, Phil.

MATTINGLY: All right, Steve Contorno I appreciate the effort, trying to figure out what this is, as always, my friend. My panel is back with me right now. Look, America First can be a lot more expansive. You just keep adding things and, you know, it's a little bit --

NICHOLS: You got to go back to the electoral college implications. Right?

MATTINGLY: Yeah, what is --

(CROSSTALK)

NICHOLS: Because you bring in the Canadian population, tough Republican --

MATTINGLY: How does the House break down in terms of the census going forward and allocation? We jump around. My assumption is --