Matt Gaetz and Denver Riggleman III: The Craven and the Courageous
Back in the day, Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank’s congressional colleagues and writers at The Hill regularly voted him as being both the brightest AND the funniest member of the House. And this, despite the fact that Barney was far to the left of most Democrats and virtually every Republican . . . not to mention being one of the few proudly “out” gay members of that body.
Today, it’s anybody’s guess who would be voted the best and brightest in the lower chamber; Maryland’s Jamie Raskin? California’s Adam Schiff? Florida’s Ted Deutch? Who knows? By the same token, the one member of the House who has the lowest rating among both Democrats and Republicans when it comes to collegiality, sincerity, honesty and professionalism is, without a doubt, North Florida’s Matt Gaetz, who as of the past several days, has become front-page news all over the country . . . so much so that even Saturday Night Live assigned one of its cast members, Pete Davidson, to skewer the hyper-conservative Tallahassee blowhard in prime time.
For those who have been vacationing on Uranus (pun likely intended), Representative Graetz is reportedly being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department over numerous allegations; the most oft-mentioned being that he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her travel, which would be a violation of what at one time was called the “Mann Act.”
(n.b. A word about the Mann Act: Passed by Congress in June 1910, the Mann Act was named after its primary author, Illinois Representative James R. Mann. The act invoked the Commerce Clause to felonize the use of interstate or foreign commerce to transport women for immoral purposes. The Act was aimed at prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking. Congress appointed a commission three years before its passage to investigate into the problem of immigrant prostitutes. It was alleged that immigrant women were brought to America for sexual slavery and immigrant men lured American girls into prostitution (or “white slavery”). Over the years it was in effect, it was used to arrest such well-known people as African-American boxer Jack Johnson (arrested and convicted in 1913, pardoned by Donald J. Trump in 2018; architect Frank Lloyd Wright (arrested, tried and acquitted in 1926 - charges eventually dropped; Charles Chaplin (arrested, tried and acquitted in 1944); and musician Chuck Barry (arrested, tried and found guilty in 1960 - served 3 years in prison). The most famous history of the early days of this act was written shortly after its passage by the “notorious” anarchist Emma Goldman in 1910. She herself would be deported during the 1919 Palmer Raids aboard the “Soviet Ark” ).
Now, before anyone gets on the “it’s all the fault of the liberal Democratic establishment and the lame-stream media" bandwagon, please know that the investigation began during the Trump Administration where A.G. Bill Barr was still calling the shots. Gaetz responded to the DOJ allegations alleging that he was the victim of a former Justice Department official seeking a $25 million extortion payment. "We have been cooperating with federal authorities in this matter, and my father has even been wearing a wire at the FBI’s direction to catch these criminals," Gaetz wrote on his Facebook account. With every passing day the story gets seedier, more complex and less credible, the potential charges ever more damning.
This past week CNN reported that Gaetz showed other Republican legislators nude photos and videos of women he claimed to have had sex with; he showed the photos while on the floor of the House chamber. Charges have also surfaced that Gaetz once led a group of Republican legislators in a game where they scored “points” for sleeping with staffers and interns—with bonus points for virgins—also resurfaced last week. Though this was not the first time. Or the second. Or even the third.
As of this past weekend, he is being investigated for whether or not he dipped into either campaign or Congressional office funds to pay for this and other alleged trysts. Then too there is a sidebar about Gaetz’s involvement with his new 26-year old fiancée Ginger Luckey (they became engaged at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club this past December) and her brother, 28-year old Palmer Luckey, a big name in the tech world who is currently seeking government defense contracts for his company (Anduril . . . named for a sword in J.,R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy) to build weaponized drones, thus taking the industry lead away from the Chinese. It turns out that Rep. Gaetz has already sponsored legislation to ban federal funds from being used to purchase Chinese drones. The measure did not pass.
In light of the initial interest in the “sex-with-a-minor-for-hire” charge, one of the most chilling and ironic things to emerge is that Gaetz, the well-heeled scion of a longtime political family (his father, the onetime president of the Florida Senate sold Vitas Healthcare Corporation business for a reported half billion dollars in 2004; his grandfather Jerry Gaetz ran for Lt. Gov. of North Dakota in 1964) the irony turned out to be that Matt Gaetz cast the lone vote against a bill (S.1536) aimed at combating human trafficking. In defending his vote against the bill - officially known as the “Combating Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act,” (which creates a committee within the Department of Transportation to develop “best practices for states and transportation groups to combat human trafficking”) Gaetz defended his vote in a Facebook broadcast averring that “despite the best intentions of the bill,” it represented "mission creep" at the federal level in creating the committee.
He further stated “Unless there is an overwhelming, compelling reason that our existing agencies in the federal government can't handle that problem, I vote no because voters in Northwest Florida did not send me to Washington to go and create more federal government . . . . If anything, we should be abolishing a lot of the agencies at the federal level like the Department of Education, like the EPA and sending that power back to our state governments."
There is a pathetic irony at work here. In recent weeks, practically every well known official in the New York state Democratic Party, and not a few national figures, have called upon New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign following allegations of sexual harassment. As of forty-eight hours ago, the number of Republican officials calling for the resignation of Rep. Matt Gaetz since it was revealed he is under investigation stands at … zero. How in the world does this fit in with political tribe that refers to itself as “the party of family values?” Somehow they’ve managed to forgive and forget the sins of such party stalwarts as Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump while piling on - not to mention impeaching - Bill Clinton for his indiscretions.
Unquestionably, Matt Gaetz’s chances of being reelected are looking rather slim. It also seems to me that are at least four possible scenarios hovering about the future of this craven “son-of-Trump”
He will resign office and become a media commentator . . . perhaps at NewsmaxTV or One America News (he has already hinted at this);
He will face a tangle of well-heeled conservatives in the 2022 Republican primary and either lose or face a run-off;
He will be expelled from the House of Representatives;
He will face trial on who knows how many charges.
Regardless of what scenario takes center stage, one can only hope that justice shall be done.
So much for the craven Matt Gaetz. Let’s briefly turn our attention to the courageous Denver Riggleman III. Denver who? Riggleman (1970- ) a Virginia Republican, served but a single term in Congress (January 3, 2019-January 3, 2021), representing Virginia’s 5th District. He was/is a mostly conservative (e.g. non-hard right) Republican who served 15 years as an intelligence officer in the United States Airforce, created, along with his wife, Christine Blair and 3 daughters, a 50-acre craft distillery in Afton, Virginia (outside of Charlottesville) called “Silverback Distillery.” Former Representative Riggleman is not your typical Republican politician. He is a longtime self-described “Bigfoot scholar” and, although he doesn’t necessarily believe in its existence, self-published a 2020 book entitled Bigfoot… It’s Complicated. In July 2019 he officiated at the same-sex marriage of 2 friends; the next month he was censured by Republican Party officials who claimed that he had “abandoned party principles.” Riggleman was defeated after serving but a single term by Bob Good, a former associate athletic director at Liberty University . . . aptly described as a “reTrumplican.”
But it wasn’t officiating at the marriage, owning and operating a distillery or his fascination with Bigfoot that got party officials to run and fund Bob Good; it was the fact that Denver Riggleman III showed uncommon valor on the floor of the House of Representatives. No, it was having the guts to be the lone Republican House member to speak in favor of the passage of H.Res. 1154, a resolution “Condemning QAnon and rejecting the conspiracy theories it promotes.” In speaking to his House colleagues about the threat of QAnon, then-Rep. Riggleman said, ““The grotesque nature of the tweets and Instagram posts and the anti-Semitic tripe spewed by QAnon adherents should cause concern for everyone . . . . [The] death threats Tom Malinowski (D-NJ - the resolution’s main sponsor) received were a surprise and a shock,. This type of behavior is easily condemned.” And for his courageous stance, Riggleman lost his seat.
But that is not the end of Denver Riggleman’s involvement in the public arena. He is now working for a group of prominent experts and academics at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of disinformation in American politics and how to thwart it. The group has undertaken several extensive investigations into how extremists have used propaganda and faked information to sow division over some of the most contentious issues of the day, like the coronavirus pandemic and police violence. Their reports have also given lawmakers a better understanding of the QAnon belief system and other radical ideologies that helped fuel the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Three cheers for this former Republican who at one point belonged to the House Freedom Caucus and actually supported Donald Trump for President in 2016.
Being a craven blowhard like Matt Gaetz might be ego-fulfilling and sexually exciting; being a courageous public servant like Denver Riggleman III can lead to political dismemberment. All things considered, I’ll take the latter over the former every day of the year.
Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone