WASHINGTON (CN) — Former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz said in an interview Friday that he would not return to his seat in January, following the collapse of his nomination for attorney general.
Gaetz, who on Thursday withdrew from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, told conservative media personality Charlie Kirk that he did not intend to return to Capitol Hill despite being reelected this month to represent the Sunshine State’s 1st Congressional District.
“I’m still going to be in the fight, but it’s going to be from a new perch,” he told Kirk on an episode of his podcast Friday. “I do not intend to join the 119th Congress.”
Gaetz had already signaled that he would not serve another term in Congress. The Florida Republican promptly resigned from the body last week after Trump nominated him as attorney general — and in his resignation letter to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis he noted that he did not intend to “take the oath of office for the same office” in January.
Members of Congress who resign their offices cannot take back their positions, but as a congressman-elect it was unclear if Gaetz’s statement to DeSantis constituted his official resignation from a new term.
The lawmaker was nominated by the president-elect and resigned from Congress just days before the House Ethics Committee was set to release a report into whether he had sex with a 17-year-old. With Gaetz off Capitol Hill, there is little the ethics panel can do to hold him accountable.
Hours before the Florida congressman backed away from Trump’s proposed cabinet, CNN reported that Gaetz had in fact had sex with the same woman on two occasions.
The Ethics Committee said Wednesday that it would not yet publish its report on the lawmaker, with Republican leadership contending that the survey was not finished. The panel will meet again in December to decide whether to release the findings.
Gaetz stood down Wednesday after a meeting with senators who would have been charged with confirming him as Trump’s attorney general. It was unclear that the former congressman had enough support, even among the Senate’s incoming Republican majority, to clinch the position.
In a post on X announcing his withdrawal, Gaetz said that the swirling charges around him had become a “distraction” for the president-elect and that he wanted to keep the administration out of a “needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.”
Gaetz, however, has denied the claims against him.
Trump said in his own post on social media platform Truth Social that he had “much respect” for Gaetz for his decision. Hours later, the president-elect nominated Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his replacement. Bondi is an experienced litigator with two terms under her belt as the Sunshine State’s top prosecutor.
Meanwhile, Gaetz’s brief stint as attorney general nominee isn’t the first time accusations of sexual misconduct against him have come up. The former lawmaker was the subject of a 2022 Department of Justice investigation into his relationship with Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector in Seminole County, Florida, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for underage sex trafficking.
The Justice Department, though, never brought charges against the former Florida congressman.
Gaetz also isn’t the only Trump cabinet pick to be mired in controversy related to accusations of sexual misconduct. Fox News host Pete Hegseth, tapped to become the next secretary of defense, is facing his own scrutiny related to claims that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017.