What happened to the Matt Gaetz criminal case?
Back in June, ABC News reported that federal prosecutors were looking to criminally indict Congressman Matt Gaetz sometime in July. But that date came and went, and Gaetz still walks free. It’s led some observers to ask what happened.
The answer is actually pretty straightforward. In August, ABC News and other sources reported that it was taking longer than expected to indict Matt Gaetz because Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg had given them so much evidence to work through, but that the decision had in fact been made to ultimately indict Gaetz.
So there’s your answer. As a result of Greenberg’s extensive cooperation, the criminal case against Matt Gaetz is going to end up being more comprehensive, thus resulting in higher odds of conviction at trial, but it’s also taking longer to reach its conclusion.
It serves as a reminder that if an ongoing criminal investigation stops getting headlines in the media, that actually has nothing to do with whether the case is still moving forward. It’s just that at certain stages of an investigation, prosecutors find it beneficial to feed things to the media, and at other stages of the investigation, they don’t – and during those quiet periods, the media will only have something to put in a headline if it manages to dig up something in its own right.
Matt Gaetz is now claiming he’s been vindicated, and the defeatists within the Resistance also seem certain that he’s magically gotten off the hook, but there’s nothing to support this. Prosecutors let the media and the public know last month that the case against Gaetz would take longer than originally expected, but would be more thorough than originally expected. That timetable is irrelevant to the impatience of any given observer out there.
Meanwhile, the defeatists will insist that because Matt Gaetz hasn’t yet been arrested, he’s out there doing unspecified “damage” or something along those lines. But that’s not based in reality. If anything, Gaetz has only served to make a fool of himself with ill-fated “victory tours” and such. His indictment will come, and if he’s convicted at trial, his political career will obviously be over at that point.
