Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said on Sunday he did not talk to President-elect Trump about releasing the House Ethics Committee report of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who resigned shortly after Trump tapped him for the job of attorney general.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” anchor Jake Tapper pressed Johnson on the timing of his statements concerning the ethics report – noting that, last Wednesday, Johnson told reporters that, as Speaker, he “can’t be involved in that,” but on Friday, Johnson said the report should not be released.
“In between those two comments, you did speak with President-elect Trump,” Tapper noted. “Did he encourage you to change your position and to squash the House Ethics Committee report from being released?”
“No, he did not,” Johnson responded in the interview. “The President and I have literally not discussed one word about the ethics report, not once, and I’ve been with him quite a bit this week – between Washington and Mar-a-Lago and last night at Madison Square Garden.”
Johnson defended his various statements on the issue as “entirely consistent” and repeated his position that Gaetz is no longer a member of the House and, therefore, the ethics committee does not have jurisdiction to investigate.
“But this is what I’ll tell you about that: What I said is entirely consistent. The Speaker of the House is not involved in ethics committee work. Can’t be, shouldn’t be, because the Speaker can’t put a thumb on the scale or have anything to do with that,” Johnson said. “So I have no idea what the contents of this report would be. I didn’t even know about it, Jake, until the middle of this week when it was announced in the press.”
“What I have said, with regard to the report, is that it should not come out. Why? Because Matt Gaetz resigned from Congress. He is no longer a member. There’s a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain, that the House Ethics committee’s jurisdiction does not extend to nonmembers of Congress.
“I think that would be a Pandora’s box. I don’t think we want the House Ethics Committee using all of its vast resources and powers to go after private citizens, and that’s what Matt Gaetz is now. He is no longer a member of Congress, so I think that’s a really important guardrail for the institution, and that’s what I was speaking to in those sound bites.”
When Tapper pushed back asking whether the American people have the right to see the report, which he noted their taxpayer dollars funded, Johnson disputed the suggestion that the report was complete already.
“My understanding is that the report is not finished. It’s in a rough draft form, was not yet ready to be released, and since Matt Gaetz left the Congress, I don’t think it’s appropriate to do so.”
Johnson noted there have been only a small number of exceptions where reports have been released about former members, adding, “I wasn’t the speaker at that time. I’m the speaker now.”
“The speaker does not have the authority to stop the release of a report by the ethics committee, but I’ve just simply said what I believe is an obvious point: that we don’t want to go down that road,” he said.
Johnson saw Trump on Thursday evening at a Mar-a-Lago gala, where Gaetz was also in attendance. But he declined to say if he has spoken with Trump about his stance on releasing the report.
“I’m not talking to anybody about what I said to Trump,” Johnson said.
