FOX NEWS
Donald Trump was in the room with JD Vance, Stephen Miller and other top advisers after calling senators to try to salvage the sinking nomination of Matt Gaetz.
He wasn’t having any luck.
“I’m using a lot of my political capital,” the president-elect told his inner circle. He could only spend so much of it, he explained.
Trump had picked up the phrase from a lawmaker who bluntly told him there was a cost to any continued effort to push the ex-congressman for attorney general, amid allegations of sexual assault and misconduct.
“Sir, we’re going to vote for you” on Gaetz, “but you’re using a lot of political capital.”
Once Trump told Gaetz that he didn’t have the votes, prompting him to withdraw, he quickly settled on Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general and career prosecutor who had precisely the experience that the embattled Gaetz lacked – and without the personal baggage. Gaetz, who is accused of sleeping with a 17-year-old girl, continues to deny any wrongdoing.
He formally withdrew 45 minutes after CNN told him it would report that he’d had a threesome – specifically, that there had been another alleged incident with Jane Doe, the woman who says she had sex with Gaetz at 17, and an adult woman.
Bondi has a history of partisan loyalty to Trump, such as defending him at his first impeachment trial, and this year, headed the legal arm of a pro-Trump firm and became a registered lobbyist.
But here’s the difference, according to insiders: She won’t go in and blow up the Justice Department, as Gaetz wanted to do. She respects the rule of law, say Florida colleagues. She even hired the Democrat who ran against her for AG, who is praising her. Yes, Bondi has talked about prosecuting “bad” prosecutors, but who can object to that?
With Gaetz out, more scrutiny has shifted to Pete Hegseth’s nomination to run the Pentagon’s global bureaucracy.
The view from Trump World is that Hegseth, as a decorated Army combat veteran, probably gets confirmed, though there is annoyance that he didn’t come clean with the transition team about having paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault, and had her sign an NDA, in what he calls a consensual encounter in California in 2017.
The transition team’s view is that Hegseth did nothing illegal, that he made a deal with the accuser who lied to save her marriage – and didn’t go to the hospital for four days – and he didn’t want this public because he feared losing his job at Fox.
I agree he’ll probably be confirmed, and the transition gang is more worried about Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. As a practical matter, I think the GOP-controlled Senate can reject only one other nominee.
The concern about Gabbard for director of national intelligence is that she has no experience in that sensitive area, that the former Democratic congressional representative met with Syrian strongman Bashar Assad despite his murder of hundreds of thousands of people, and often seems to echo the Putin line. The question is whether she is even qualified.
There is even more concern about Kennedy’s bid to become HHS secretary. He has some good ideas, but even putting aside his history of infidelity, he embraces one conspiracy theory after another: Vaccines cause autism, WiFi causes cancer, water systems should stop using fluoride.
The worst, by far, is what he said in 2020, embracing the idea that the federal government deliberately created the pandemic – what he called the “plandemic” – that killed 1.2 million Americans. This is the equivalent of 9/11 truthers.
