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Attorney General Jeff Sessions should rescind his recusal on the investigation into Russia’s interference with the 2016 election, haul in special counsel Robert Mueller and order him to reveal any evidence of collusion that would justify continuing the special counsel’s probe, says Congressman Matt Gaetz. And if that evidence doesn’t exist, the Florida Republican says, “then let’s go ahead and wrap this thing up.”
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Gaetz, one of the most enthusiastic defenders of President Trump on cable news, doesn’t trust Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing Mueller. He believes Rosenstein has sheltered Mueller ever since recommending the former FBI director to replace Jim Comey atop the bureau, and believes Rosenstein has been compromised by signing renewals for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to the Carter Page investigation.
“I still think there’s time for Jeff Sessions to do the right thing,” Gaetz told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.
Gaetz, 35, has become as much as anyone an avatar of Congress and the GOP and Washington in the age of Trump. He does not have much experience, but he stresses what he’s learned from it. He does not have much inside knowledge of the Mueller probe, but he knows exactly what he thinks of it. He talks about how awful Washington is, but he’s become a prominent presence in it. He’s the son of a locally famous politician who helped get him where he is, but now he’s a proud Trump protege.
And he does it all on TV.
The hard part about trying to schedule an interview with Gaetz is that his schedule is busy with so many other interviews. He points out that he’s in the middle of 12, maybe 13, profiles. His media hits run from InfoWars to the National Enquirer, and he’s now enough of a regular in the greenrooms at Fox and MSNBC that he jokes around with the makeup people.
Now reporters know to call. So does the president.
Late at night or early in the morning, Gaetz’s cellphone will ring—sometimes from a blocked number, sometimes from “a 10-digit number that starts with a 202-area code.”
“He’s always very funny and very laudatory, and he’s one of the great showmen of a political generation. And so I think that there’s a certain element of the president that wants to confer onto others some of his skills,” Gaetz said. “I think he said one time that I should smile more when he thought I wasn’t smiling enough. And told me he liked my new haircut.”
Gaetz says Trump isn’t coaching him. “It’s more about the president wanting to keep his finger on the pulse of the Congress, where we stand, what people are discussing,” Gaetz said.
Most often, he’s been discussing Russia and Mueller’s ongoing investigation.
Gaetz hasn’t read the underlying intelligence, but he’s read the controversial memo written by House Intel Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), which criticized the surveillance of Page without drawing from the underlying intelligence used to justify the wiretaps, and he’s read the various Mueller indictments. He believes Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin didn’t want Hillary Clinton to become president, and he accepts the fact that Russia attempted to interfere with the 2016 election— as it has in other free elections around the world—but insists it wasn’t very extensive.
Gaetz likens Russia’s 2016 involvement to “emptying a thimble of vinegar into the ocean hoping to change its chemical composition.” And anyway, Trump’s campaign was too much of a mess to have been up to anything like collusion.
“The Trump campaign was lurching from one event to the next. I had some familiarity with the campaign. I spoke at, I think, four of the Trump rallies that were in Florida, and these were not highly coordinated events. I would often learn of the program of one of these events just a day or so before the event itself,” Gaetz said. “That seems to evidence the point that these were not people off colluding with Russia.”
He blames the ongoing hubbub about Russia on “the left” and “the media.” True, Gaetz says, Trump hasn’t done anything to denounce the Russians for the incursion into the elections, but on the other hand, “the president could never say enough to satisfy some in the mainstream media and some on the political left as it relates to Russia.”
The president who needs to be investigated more, Gaetz believes, is Barack Obama. Asked if he thinks Obama wiretapped Trump—as the president alleged in a tweet a year ago and never provided evidence of despite staff insisting he would—Gaetz said, “I believe the Obama administration did.”
“I think we’ve still got to pull the thread on that sweater. But what I’ve seen to date is that the administration most certainly was engaged in surveillance that was alleged by the president when he was mocked,” Gaetz said. “I think we’ve got to interview more witnesses. One of my frustrations is that the Judiciary Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee announced a very ambitious investigation to interview 20 witnesses. And in 2½ months, we’ve interviewed two of them, and subsequent to both of their interviews, they’ve left the employment of the federal government. So it would seem to me that that would prod the committee leadership to enhance the pace of that investigation, and it is frustrating to me that it’s been so slow.”
For all the time he spends injecting himself into the media bloodstream, Gaetz insists he doesn’t enjoy it.
“Look, this isn’t summer camp. You don’t pick the merit badges you want to earn. This is serious work and I do believe the president has gotten a raw deal on Russia. I think I have an argument to make, and I’m willing to go make it,” he said. “I do think that if you’ve got a compelling argument to make in this country, going on television, going online, being on social media, you’ve got a broader ability to be effective at communicating your message if you engage a wide span of platforms, rather than just standing on the House floor in the middle of the night, speaking to an empty room.”
Gaetz liked the state Legislature in Tallahassee better. He says he doesn’t understand the pace of Congress, and doesn’t understand most of his fellow Republicans—notably on issues where the president he so vigilantly defends has moved the party further away from where he wants it to be.
“We should not be a party that is opposed to science. I don’t think this is a parochial issue for me as a Floridian. I fear that history will judge very harshly those who deny the science of climate change, and I just don’t intend to be among them,” Gaetz said. “There is an ability for people who got elected to Congress to hold on to their dogmatic views. I encounter this on cannabis reform, on climate change. I don’t understand what Republicans have to gain from appearing like we’re mean to gay people.”
Not everyone loves how Gaetz is appearing: He’s facing a primary challenge back home in his Panhandle district (where the Republican nomination is all that matters) from a 2016 opponent who’s come back at him, attacking him for being a fake conservative and a career politician.
After the podcast microphones turned off, Gaetz started talking about Sam Nunberg, the former Trump aide who can’t stop doing interviews about not being able to stop doing interviews.
Ratings, he said. That’s what he’s learned. People will do anything for ratings in Washington.
“I take it for what it is,” Gaetz said. “It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a condition.”