The House Ethics Committee is expected to meet Thursday after the panel failed to reach an agreement last month on whether to release the report on former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.
However, the report could still be made public even if history repeats itself. Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., moved to force a vote releasing the report Tuesday through a measure known as a “privileged resolution.”
Designating a resolution as “privileged” gives House leaders two parliamentary days to consider it, with the deadline set for Thursday.
The House Ethics Committee has been investigating allegations against Gaetz involving sex with a minor and illegal drug use for years.
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Former Rep. Matt Gaetz resigned from Congress last month. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Gaetz has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and a parallel federal investigation into the Florida congressman ended without him being charged.
The House Ethics Committee’s investigation came to an abrupt halt last month after he resigned from Congress, hours after President-elect Trump appointed him as his attorney general.
Gaetz ignored amid quiet but steady opposition from the Republican Party, but the committee lost jurisdiction over the investigation when Gaetz left the House of Representatives.
His resignation came just before the committee was expected to meet to consider releasing the report.
That meeting took place about a week later and ended with one tense note.
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Representative Michael Guest heads the House Ethics Committee. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Chairman Michael Guest, R-Miss., told reporters there was no agreement on releasing the report, while the rest of the normally secretive committee said little to reporters crowded outside the meeting room.
His comments prompted Rep. Susan Wild, D-Pa., the top Democrat on the committee, to backtrack and criticize Guest for talking about the meeting at all.
“We just finished a two-hour ethics committee meeting, and I had no intention of making any comments. I walked out of the committee without making one and walked back to my office,” Wild began.
‘We agreed that we would not discuss what happened during the meeting. But it has come to my attention that the Chairman has since betrayed the process by making our deliberations public within moments of leaving the committee, and he has suggested that there was an agreement by the committee not to make the report public .”
Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., is seeking to force a House-wide vote on releasing the ethics report. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
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She called it “untrue to the extent that it suggests that the committee agreed or that we had a consensus on that.”
But now that Gaetz is no longer in the running for attorney general, there likely isn’t as much pressure on Republicans to agree to release the report.
A significant number of Republican lawmakers who suggested they would be open to it argued that it was in the public’s interest to see the report if Gaetz were to lead the Justice Department, a factor that is no longer in play .
