The former Justice Department official accused by Rep. Matt Gaetz of extortion has called the Republican’s claims ‘completely, totally false’ and said they are ‘a blatant attempt to distract from the fact that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking of minors’.
Attorney David McGee said today he was not part of a plan to extort Gaetz nor was he connected to the DOJ’s sex trafficking probe.
Yesterday, Gaetz claimed he is the victim of a $25 million extortion plot after it was revealed he is under investigation for sex trafficking over allegations he had a sexual relationship with a teenage girl, 17, and paid to have her travel with him.
The Republican congressman and close ally of Donald Trump accused McGee live on Tucker Carlson of trying to extort millions of dollars out of him and his family in exchange for ‘making horrible sex trafficking allegations against me go away.’
Gaetz claimed he had been working with the FBI and his father Don Gaetz had been wearing a wire to expose the alleged scheme after learning of it earlier this month.
But McGee, an attorney at Beggs & Lane law firm and the former lead attorney for the DOJ’s Organized Crime Task Force, said: ‘It is completely false. It’s a blatant attempt to distract from the fact that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking of minors.
‘I have no connection with that case at all, other than, one of a thousand people who have heard the rumors.’
The attorney said Gaetz’s father had ‘called me and asked to talk to me’ and said he would welcome a tape of their conversation being made public. He did not detail what the conversation was about but insisted it was nothing ‘untoward’ but simply ‘a pleasant conversation of a dad concerned about his son and the trouble his son was in’.
He added: ‘If there is a tape, play the tape. There is nothing on that tape that is untoward.’
Carlson said later it was “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted.”
Three sources told the Times an investigation was launched into his alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl during Trump’s final months in office under then-Attorney General Bill Barr.
The inquiry is said to be part of a wider probe into Florida official Joel Greenberg, who was slapped with a string of charges last year including sex trafficking a minor between the age of 14 and 17.
Times’ reporter Katie Benner told MSNBC it is Gaetz who had in fact ‘blown up’ the alleged extortion investigation in an effort to divert attention away from the fact the sex trafficking concerns were serious enough for the Trump administration to launch an investigation – even though Gaetz is a close ally of the president.
Gaetz, 38, is close to Trump and got engaged to food analyst Ginger Luckey, 26, at his Mar-a-Lago club in late December.
Reports of the two investigations came just hours after it was revealed Gaetz is considering retiring from Congress and taking a job at right-wing news outlet Newsmax.