Tag: Rep. Gaetz

Federal agents investigating Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz for possibly underaged sex trafficking and for a possible sexual relationship with an underaged girl were able to get a federal judge to sign off on a search warrant and execute that warrant, seizing his iPhone late last year.

“Gaetz’s predicament as the subject of a serious investigation became clearer this winter when federal agents executed a search warrant and seized his iPhone, Politicoreports, “according to interviews with three people who were told of the matter by Gaetz, who changed his phone number in late December.”

“Around that time, the sources said, federal agents also seized his former girlfriend’s phone before she went into work at a state agency in the morning. She declined comment.” Continue reading.

The missive arrived at an Orlando-area preparatory school in October 2019, outlining a damaging allegation against a music teacher there.

The teacher, in the letter’s telling, had had an inappropriate sexual relationship with the purported student who had written it. And the writer claimed to offer proof: private Facebook messages in which the teacher, Brian Beute, told his alleged victim: “Please remember to keep this a secret. I could go to jail.”

Beute, who had recently announced his candidacy in the local tax collector’s race, knew the allegation was a lie, as investigators quickly determined. But what he could not foresee is how the ploy to sabotage his run for local office would drag the seedy politics in Seminole County, Fla., into the national spotlight and put a U.S. congressman with close ties to former president Donald Trump in the crosshairs of a Justice Department investigation. Continue reading.

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — The first thing some of the women were asked to do when they got to the house parties in the gated community in suburban Orlando was to put away their cellphones, according to two women in attendance who spoke to CNN in recent days. The men inside, a who’s who of local Republican officials that often included Rep. Matt Gaetz, did not want the night’s activities documented. 

The partygoers, at times dressed in formal wear from a political event they’d just left, mingled and shared drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. Some had sex.

Gaetz, the brash Republican, liked to discuss politics, said one of the women. He behaved like a “frat type of party boy,” she said, sometimes taking pills she believed were recreational drugs. Continue reading.