Meet Matt Gaetz, Trump's controversial pick for US attorney general who withdrew from consideration

Gaetz's father, Don Gaetz, served in the Florida State Senate from 2006 to 2016, including a stint as its president from 2012 to 2014. In November, he was reelected to his old seat representing Florida Senate District 1.

Gaetz's grandfather, Jerry Gaetz, served in the North Dakota Senate and as the mayor of Rugby, North Dakota.

Gaetz earned a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary sciences from Florida State University and his law degree from William & Mary Law School.

Gaetz represented Florida's 4th district in the Florida House of Representatives from 2010 to 2016.

Gaetz and Luckey met at Mar-a-Lago in 2020 and wed a year later.

Her brother, Palmer Luckey, founded the virtual reality company Oculus and is a billionaire Republican donor.

Gaetz was elected to represent Florida's 1st district in the House of Representatives in 2016.

A month after becoming a member of Congress in 2017, Gaetz introduced a bill to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2018, he invited Charles C. Johnson, an alt-right figure who has denied the Holocaust, to the State of the Union. Gaetz told The Daily Beast that he gave Johnson a ticket after he "showed up at my office" on the day of the speech but that the two did not know each other.

In 2019, he barged into a deposition of a former National Security Council official connected to Trump's impeachment inquiry. A meeting transcript showed that Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff swiftly kicked him out of the room, telling the lawmaker, "Mr. Gaetz, take your statement to the press. They do you no good here. So please, absent yourself."

During a 2020 vote to approve $8.3 billion in emergency funding for coronavirus aid, Gaetz wore a gas mask on the House floor.

In 2021, he went on an "America First" tour with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in which the two lawmakers repeated Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was "stolen."

Gaetz is also known for insulting his Democratic and Republican colleagues alike, calling Sen. Mitch McConnell "McFailure," deriding Utah Senator-elect John Curtis as "Mitt Romney without good hair," and calling abortion rights activists "ugly" and "overweight."

In April 2021, The New York Times reported that the Justice Department was investigating whether Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her to travel with him using campaign funds, which would violate federal sex-trafficking laws.

The House Ethics Committee then announced that it would launch its own investigation into Gaetz's conduct. Gaetz denied the allegations.

In February 2023, the Justice Department ended its sex-trafficking investigation without bringing criminal charges against Gaetz, prompting the House Ethics Committee to reopen its own inquiry.

When Republicans retook control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms, McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House in a tumultuous process that lasted several days and nearly came to blows on the House floor.

McCarthy made concessions to secure votes from Gaetz and other far-right GOP lawmakers, including allowing any House member to file a "motion to vacate" the House Speaker role.

Dissatisfied with McCarthy's leadership, Gaetz introduced a motion to vacate against him months later. The House voted McCarthy out in October 2023.

McCarthy appeared to reference Gaetz while speaking at Georgetown University in April, saying that he lost his job as House Speaker because "one person wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old," Politico reported. In response, Gaetz called McCarthy a "liar."

"Matt will root out the systemic corruption at DOJ and return the Department to its true mission of fighting Crime and upholding our Democracy and Constitution," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social announcing Gaetz's nomination.

The appointment, which requires Senate confirmation, would have put Gaetz in charge of the Department of Justice, the same organizational body that once investigated sex-trafficking allegations against him.

While Republicans have a majority in the Senate, some Republican lawmakers expressed skepticism about Gaetz's chances of being confirmed.

Lisa Murkowski of Arkansas told MSNBC that she didn't think Gaetz was "a serious nomination for the attorney general."

GOP Rep. Max Miller told CNN, "I don't think Matt cares if he gets confirmed or not. Everybody's talking about him, and that's what he likes the most."

Gaetz resigned two days before the House Ethics Committee was scheduled to vote on releasing the report from its investigation. His replacement in Congress will be chosen through a special election.

Although the House Ethics Committee no longer has jurisdiction over former members and did not reach an agreement in that meeting, it could still vote to release the report.

In a post announcing his withdrawal on X, Gaetz wrote, "While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition."

Trump echoed Gaetz's reasoning in a post on Truth Social, writing that Gaetz "was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect."

Trump's post continued: "Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!"