Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has not buckled in his support for President Donald Trump, like many in his party have.
In fact, Gaetz has gone after them, and urged GOP voters to elect “America First” candidates over what he refers to as the inside-the-Beltway elitists.
But Gaetz has just shown how far his loyalty to Trump goes.
He’s willing to leave Congress, if the 45th president asked him.
Trump’s second impeachment trial in the Senate starts Tuesday.
In an interview with Newsmax on Friday, one of Trump’s former senior advisers, Peter Navarro, suggested the president should shift defense tactics – and key to that would be hiring Gaetz as his new lawyer.
Navarro said Trump should shelve the argument that it’s unconstitutional to impeach a president who is no longer in office – a line of defense that already has support from 90 percent of GOP senators and will ensure Trump’s second acquittal.
Rather, he said, Trump should apply an “affirmative defense.”
“You gotta get rid of those guys. These people don’t understand. This is a political trial, and the Democrats are coming hard at the president on political grounds,” Navarro told Newsmax host Steve Cortes after he played a video of Trump’s lawyer, Bruce Castor, outlining how the former president will attack the argument that he incited the riot that rocked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
“Why not provide an affirmative defense?” Navarro continued.
“Now, the way to do that is you get somebody like Matt Gaetz as your lead attorney instead of that stuff you had on and then you use the Navarro report and other reports that have been put out, which have been excellent, as your exhibits A, B, C, and D.”
In an op-ed in Wednesday’s Washington Times, Cortes, an adviser to Trump’s 2020 campaign, explained that Navarro’s report shows “unequivocally that election irregularities across six dimensions in the six most contested battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — resulted in what he describes as election theft ‘by a thousand cuts.’”
Cortes maintained that Navarro’s report “should be required reading for every member of Congress,” as well as “required reading for every American citizen concerned about the integrity of our elections and who are readying to watch the upcoming impeachment trial.”
For his part, Gaetz is ready to go to bat for Trump.
This week, he told Trump’s former campaign manager Steve Bannon, who now hosts the “War Room Pandemic” podcast, that he would resign his seat to be Trump’s advocate if the 45th president asked him to.
“I love my district. I love representing them. But I view this cancellation of the Trump presidency and the Trump movement as one of the major risks to my people, both in my district and all throughout this great country,” said Gaetz, who represents much of the Florida Panhandle.
“If the president called me and wanted me to go defend him on the floor of the Senate, that would be the top priority in my life,” Gaetz added.
“I would leave my House seat, I would leave my home, I would do anything I had to do to ensure that the greatest president in my lifetime – one of the greatest presidents our country has ever had, maybe the greatest president our country has ever had — got a full-throated defense that wasn’t crouched down, that wasn’t in fear of losing some moderate Republican senator, but that was worthy of the fight that he gave to the great people of this country for four years.”
Gaetz, without naming names, added that he was not the only Republican to ask the House Ethics Committee if he could be involved in representing Trump.
I am just amazed that there are still those in office that still claim they are Republicans, they’re is no Republican party, it’s the party of trump Worshipers