Damning supercut shows Mike Johnson 'flip-flopping' to protect Trump AG pick

A supercut aired on CNN showed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) “flip-flopping” on calls for the House Ethics Committee to release a report about Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, Kaitlan Collins reports.

Collins on Friday was discussing the Trump transition team’s refusal to sign “a series of transition agreements with the Biden administration." CNN reporters Betsy Klein and Alayna Treene reported last weekend that the Trump team is hesitating to sign those agreements "in part because of concerns over the mandatory ethics pledge vowing to avoid conflicts of interest once sworn in to office."

Collins then aired an October interview between herself and Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick, who last month called the transition agreements “a low-grade issue.” (Lutnick, in that interview, also insisted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “not getting a job” as head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Trump on Thursday announced Kennedy as his pick to lead HHS.)

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Collins noted that given the myriad controversies surrounding several of Trumps’ Cabinet picks, the transition team’s refusal to sign agreements with the Biden White House “clearly is shaping up to be an important issue.”

Chief among Trump’s Cabinet controversies is his pick of Gaetz for attorney general. As Politico reports, lawmakers on the bipartisan House Ethics Committee recently finished “their long-running report into [Gaetz's] alleged misconduct,” including claims he had sex with a minor.

Now, Politico reports, the panel faces and "existential crisis" over whether or not to release the report.

According to CNN's Collins, Speaker Johnson recently “chang[ed]” his tune on whether or not the American public deserves transparency in this matter.

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“House Speaker Mike Johnson today changing and flip-flopping on whether or not the report from the House Ethics investigation into the former congressman — and now Trump's attorney general pick — Matt Gaetz, should be released,” Collins reported Friday.

The CNN host then played a clip of Johnson previously saying the speaker of the House “is not involved in that, cannot be involved in that” — followed immediately by a video of Johnson on Friday “strongly request[ing] that the ethics committee not issue a report.”

Should the committee follow Johnson’s plea, details regarding the allegations against Gaetz will likely still leak out, watchdogs warn. As ABC News reported Friday, "an attorney representing two women who were witnesses in the House Ethics Committee's investigation” into Gaetz “told ABC News that one of his clients testified that she witnessed the Florida congressman having sex with a minor."

Watch the video below or at this link.

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