Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) mentioned on Sunday he didn’t speak to President-elect Trump about releasing the Home Ethics Committee report of former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who resigned shortly after Trump tapped him for the job of lawyer normal.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” anchor Jake Tapper pressed Johnson on the timing of his statements regarding the ethics report – noting that, final Wednesday, Johnson instructed reporters that, as Speaker, he “can’t be involved in that,” however on Friday, Johnson mentioned the report shouldn’t be launched.
“In between those two comments, you did speak with President-elect Trump,” Tapper famous. “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 within 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 varied statements on the problem as “entirely consistent” and repeated his place that Gaetz is now not a member of the Home and, due to this fact, the ethics committee doesn’t have jurisdiction to analyze.
“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 mentioned. “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’ve mentioned, with regard to the report, is that it shouldn’t come out. Why? As a result of Matt Gaetz resigned from Congress. He’s now not a member. There’s an important protocol and custom and rule that we keep, that the Home Ethics committee’s jurisdiction doesn’t prolong 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 again asking whether or not the American folks have the appropriate to see the report, which he famous their taxpayer {dollars} funded, Johnson disputed the suggestion that the report was full 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 famous there have been solely a small variety of exceptions the place studies have been launched about former members, including, “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 mentioned.
Johnson noticed Trump on Thursday night at a Mar-a-Lago gala, the place Gaetz was additionally in attendance. However 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 mentioned.
