President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, putting forward a firebrand who has tussled with Jewish groups, embraced an antisemitic conspiracy theory and associated with a Holocaust denier.
As attorney general, Gaetz would head the government department responsible for investigating and prosecuting hate crimes, including antisemitism.
Gaetz, 42, was elected to Congress in 2016, where he has represented a district in the Florida Panhandle and has gained a reputation as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters. Senators from both parties appeared surprised by the nomination, potentially imperiling Gaetz’s chances of securing the job. If he is confirmed to the role by the Senate, he would succeed Merrick Garland, a former federal judge who is Jewish.
Since taking office, Gaetz has made headlines for sparring with Jews and Jewish organizations. He has also been investigated for sex trafficking.
In 2018, the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Anti-Defamation League both criticized Gaetz, then in his first term, for inviting a Holocaust denier as his guest at the State of the Union address. The guest, Charles Johnson, had publicly doubted that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and suggested falsely that only 250,000 had died of illness.
“This organization is deeply troubled by the comments from Charles C. Johnson, and it is incredibly important for the congressman to acknowledge he is a Holocaust denier and has extensive writings that attest to that and that it was wrong to bring him to the State of the Union,” RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks told BuzzFeed at the time.
The ADL also called on Gaetz to repudiate Johnson’s extremist views, writing in a letter to the representative that inviting Johnson was “an insult to the memories of those killed in the Holocaust, to their families, and to the Jewish community.”
Gaetz denied that Johnson was a Holocaust denier. He told BuzzFeed that Johnson “is not a Holocaust denier and he’s not an anti-Semite. He’s a provoker, I should’ve vetted him better before inviting him to the State of the Union, I regret that I didn’t. That’s my fault. I take responsibility for it. But he is not a Holocaust denier.”
In 2021, as the Justice Department was investigating Gaetz for sex trafficking, his relationship with Jewish politician Joel Greenberg drew scrutiny. Prosecutors ultimately declined to pursue charges against Gaetz, who denied any wrongdoing.
Greenberg was a friend of Gaetz who had been indicted for stalking, sex trafficking and other charges. Greenberg had served as tax collector for Seminole County from 2017 until 2020 and resigned because of the indictments.
Later that year, in an unrelated incident, Gaetz called the ADL “racist” after it demanded that Fox News fire host Tucker Carlson over his promotion of the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
Gaetz wrote that Carlson was “CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” adding, “The ADL is a racist organization.”
And during a House Judiciary Committee hearing in November 2023, Gaetz grilled Pamela Nadell, the director of the Jewish Studies program at American University, over whether it was possible to criticize Jewish megadonor and Holocaust survivor George Soros without being antisemitic.
Gaetz had previously accused Soros — who has become one of the primary targets of criticism, and of antisemitism, on the right for his support of liberal causes — of funding the so-called migrant caravan that Republicans made a centerpiece of the 2018 midterm election.
Soros’ Open Society Foundations responded to Gaetz at the time, writing in a statement that, “We would encourage Rep. Gaetz to get his facts straight and try not to fuel the climate of fear and hatred that is emboldening extremists and stoking threats of violence.” Three days after the statement, a man who was preoccupied by the caravan murdered 11 Jews in their Pittsburgh synagogue.
This past spring, Gaetz, alongside Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, opposed a bill that would codify an official definition of antisemitism because it classified the view that Jews killed Jesus — which Gaetz endorsed — as antisemitic.
“The Gospel itself would meet the definition of antisemitism under the terms of this bill!” Gaetz wrote on X, adding, “The Bible is clear. There is no myth or controversy on this.”
Trump has indicated that he sees the attorney general position as crucial to his agenda. “Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System,” he wrote on Truth Social, his social media network, when he announced his pick of Gaetz. “Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.”
Several Jewish groups quickly denounced Trump’s pick of Gaetz.
“Rep. Matt Gaetz has a long history of trafficking in antisemitism — from explaining his vote against the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act by invoking the centuries-old trope that Jews killed Jesus to defending the Great Replacement Theory and inviting a Holocaust denier as his 2018 State of the Union guest,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “He should not be appointed to any high office, much less one overseeing the impartial execution of our nation’s laws.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition, which has congratulated several Trump nominees on social media and had applauded both of Trump’s attorney general nominations in his first term, did not issue a statement about Gaetz.
Some Republicans are openly opposing his nomination. Sen. Max Miller of Ohio told CNN’s Haley Talbot that Gaetz is “literally worse than the gum on the bottom of my shoe” and said he did not think Gaetz particularly cared about whether he ultimately assumed the attorney general role. Miller is Jewish and a former Trump aide.
“Everybody’s talking about him and that’s what he likes the most,” Miller said, according to Talbot.
Whatever happens with the nomination process, Gaetz won’t be returning to Congress. In a surprising move, he submitted his resignation shortly after getting the attorney general nod, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced on Wednesday. The nod and resignation reportedly came days before the House Ethics Committee was due to decide whether to release a report from its own probe into the allegations against Gaetz.
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