The Darrell McClain show
Independent media that won't reinforce tribalism. We have one Planet; nobody's leaving so let’s reason together!! Darrell, McClain is a Military veteran with an abnormal interest in politics, economics, religion, philosophy, science, and literature. He was born and raised in Jacksonville FL, and went to Edward H white High School where he wrestled Under Coach Jermy Smith and The Late Brian Gilbert. He was a team wrestling captain, District champion, and an NHSCA All-American in freestyle Wrestling. He received a wrestling scholarship from Waldorf University in Forest City, Iowa. After a short period, he decided he no longer wanted to cut weight which effectively ended his college wrestling journey. Darrell Mcclain is an Ordained Pastor under The Universal Life Church and is still in good standing, he's a Believer in The Doctrines of Grace Also Known as Calvinism. He joined the United States Navy in 2008 and was A Master At Arms (military police officer) He was awarded several awards while on active duty including an expeditionary combat medal, a Global War on Terror medal, a National Defense Medal, a Korean defense medal, and multiple Navy achievement medals. While In the Navy he was also the assistant wrestling coach at Robert E Lee High School. He's a Brown Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under six six-degree black belt Gustavo Machado, Darrell Trains At Gustavo Machado Norfolk under the 3rd-degree black belt, and Former Marine Professor Mark Sausser. He went to school for psychology at American Military University and for criminal justice at ECPI University.
The Darrell McClain show
The Matt Gaetz Scandal: Unraveling Ethical Violations and Political Ambitions
Brace yourself for the explosive revelations surrounding former Congressman Matt Gaetz, a saga that challenges the very fabric of political ethics. With allegations of sex trafficking and misuse of funds, we unpack how a once-promising career spiraled into controversy. Join us alongside lawyer Liz Dye as we scrutinize the House Ethics Committee's shocking findings, detailing how Gaetz allegedly paid over $90,000 to women, including a minor, for illicit activities. We dissect the political chess game that ensued, forcing the release of this damning report despite initial Republican resistance, and the dramatic aftermath that saw Gaetz resign from Congress after a short-lived nomination as Attorney General by Donald Trump.
But the story doesn't end there. Unravel the legal entanglements involving Gaetz's father and a high-profile extortion attempt, as well as Gaetz's bold political ambitions that defy the odds. From the courtroom drama with Judge Ahmed Mehta to Gaetz's audacious plans to disclose congressional secrets, he continues to stir the political pot with talk of a possible gubernatorial run in Florida. As we explore these developments, we invite you to consider the lasting implications on Gaetz's career and the broader landscape of political accountability. Tune in for an episode that lays bare the complexities and consequences of one of the most scandalous chapters in recent political history.
Former Congressman Matt Gaetz oh, that has a nice ring to it tried like hell to prevent the congressional report of his misdeeds from coming out, including filing a lawsuit that went nowhere, but now the report of his sexcapades is out, for better or worse. Yes, it's only been about one month since Gaetz withdrew his appointment as America's top law enforcement officer, and now the House Ethics Committee just released a disturbingly graphic report of his behavior, which details the accounts of 12 women that Gates paid a combined total of over $90,000 in exchange for sex and illegal drugs, including, allegedly, a 17-year-old minor. What happens next? Well, here to break down this insane story of lust lies, and the law is chaos. Lawyer Liz Dye.
Speaker 2:Thanks, devin. On November 13, donald Trump announced his intention to nominate Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz immediately resigned from Congress, despite having just run for and won re-election to his seat. The move was seen as a transparent attempt to head off the release of a report by the House Ethics Committee on allegations that Gaetz had participated in sex trafficking, including of a minor Republican. House Speaker, mike Johnson, vocally opposed releasing the report to the public, even as its conclusions were pretty clearly relevant to Gaetz's fitness to be the top law enforcement officer in the land. But Gaetz's notoriously obnoxious behavior, including his habit of whipping out his phone to show off nude pictures of his sex partners, was no secret in DC.
Speaker 3:This is a guy that didn't have that the media didn't give a time of day to after he was accused of sleeping with an underage girl. There's a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him, because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the house floor that all of us had walked away of the girls that he had slept with. He'd brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night. This is obviously before he got married.
Speaker 2:For the record, that was then-Congressman, now Oklahoma Senator, mark Wayne Mullen, who said he might still consider voting for Gates as Attorney General. But Mullen aside, it became clear almost immediately that the Senate would never vote to confirm Gates. So, November 21, he withdrew his nomination and now he's headed to One American News Network to read the news to its dozens of viewers every day.
Speaker 4:And bringing on a firebrand of a talk show host to our primetime lineup. May I announce Matt Gates and the Matt Gates Show coming next month to OAN. Hey, Matt.
Speaker 2:Initially, the committee voted against releasing the report, with all Republicans opposed, but at a closed-door meeting on December 5th, two Republican members switched their vote and agreed to make it public on the 23rd. The report is now out and it's well, it's icky. Gaetz defended himself by saying that my 30s were an era of working very hard and playing hard too. It's embarrassing, though not criminal, that I probably partied, womanized, drank and smoked more than I should have earlier in life, which sounds conveniently like he was just a kid blowing off steam in an age-appropriate boys-will-be-boys way, they said. Representative Gates took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity, for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter. In fact, the committee found that the 42-year-old congressman paid very young women for sex and drugs, including one girl who was 17 at the time. That is statutory rape as a matter of Florida law. They also noted that he voted against the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 2022 and was the lone no vote in 2017 on legislation to establish an advisory committee that would coordinate efforts to prevent human trafficking, a vote he defended by pointing to his work in the Florida legislature to broaden the definition of duress in the state's trafficking laws to include economic duress. The committee also found that he violated multiple house rules about disclosure of gifts and services to women who were not his constituents.
Speaker 2:Many people have insisted that Gates should have been prosecuted by the Justice Department. Friend of the channel, Mitchell Eppner, suggests that the real failure was that of local Florida prosecutors. To understand what really happened here, we'll have to first talk about a bunch of drifters and weirdos, several of whom wound up in jail. It's a wild story that involves public Venmo transactions, a kidnapped Iranian hostage and the love hotel emoji which is apparently a thing on all our phones. Who knew? Okay, SPF up, because it's time to meet some spectacular Florida men. First up, Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector for Seminole County. Under Florida law, tax collectors are elected officials responsible for collecting taxes, obviously, but also for issuing various permits and government documents, including driver's licenses. Greenberg is currently in jail for committing a truly wild array of crimes. He once caused a fire in a county building where he commandeered the county servers to mine bitcoins.
Speaker 2:He doled out three and a half million dollars in state government contracts to various friends and acquaintances, including the groomsman at his wedding, and he sent letters to the school where his political opponent worked, impersonating students and falsely accusing his rival of being a pedophile. But what brought him into the ambit of federal investigators and eventually ensnared Gates was Greenberg's habit of generating fake state IDs for himself and for the women he was sleeping with. On Monday, april 16th 2018, an employee at the Lake Mary branch of the tax collector's office opened up shop and discovered that the alarm wasn't on. She also found a bunch of expired driver's licenses which were supposed to be shredded, strewn all over Greenberg's desk. She reviewed the security camera footage, where she saw that Greenberg had been in the office with an unidentified man, and when the employee texted, greenberg responded that he'd been showing Congressman Gates what our operation looked like, you know, on the weekend, in the middle of the night, as one does. When Greenberg got picked up by the feds in 2020 for stalking his political opponent online, he had at least five fake IDs on him, which is why the cops went and talked to the people at the Lake Mary office, and that's how they got to Gates, because as soon as the FBI started pulling at the threads of Greenberg's nasty personal life, they found that he was inextricably tied in with Gates' own sordid stuff.
Speaker 2:Greenberg recruited very young women off the Sugar Daddy website seeking arrangement, paying them to spend time with Greenberg, gates and their male friends. The arrangement included sex and often drugs, and one of those girls turned out to be a 17-year-old high school junior, which meant that she could not legally consent to sex with an adult over the age of 24 under Florida law. In June of 2020, greenberg was charged with stalking and identity theft, and in August of 2020, the Justice Department filed a superseding indictment against him for child sex trafficking, which meant that the feds had a very sleazy person in custody with a very strong incentive to say absolutely anything that might save his skin. In early 2021, the New York Times reported that Gates was under federal investigation for sex trafficking in relation to the 17-year-old girl. Gates insists that this was a politically motivated act by Joe Biden's henchmen, but the reality is that the investigation began during the waning days of the last Trump administration, when Bill Barr was still the Attorney General, and while the investigation was still going on behind closed doors.
Speaker 2:Reporters were hot on the trail, although, to be fair, they didn't have to dig very deep, since Gates and Greenberg both left their Venmo history public until well into 2021. The Daily Beast reported that in May of 2018, gates Venmoed Greenberg $900, writing in the memo line hit up with the name of the 17-year-old girl. The next morning, greenberg Venmoed the girl and two other women in three separate transactions, denominated as school, school and tuition, totaling $900. Gates denied paying women for sex, telling the Daily Beast the last time I had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old I was 17. But before it dawned on him that he would be wise to make his Venmo, private reporters Jose Pagliari and Roger Sullenberger clocked thousands of dollars Gates sent to Greenberg, including one transaction for $300 on November 1, 2018, with the love hotel emoji in the memo line. The Daily Beast confirmed that Greenberg did indeed book a hotel for that evening in Winter Park, florida.
Speaker 2:And that turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. According to the House report, using personal checks, venmo and Cash App, gates sent more than $90,000 to 12 women in exchange for sex and drugs. Gates denied ever paying for sex, telling Axios in March of 2020, I have definitely, in my single days, provided for women. I've dated, you know I've paid for flights, for hotel rooms. I've been, you know, generous as a partner. I think someone is trying to make that look criminal when it's not here. He is on Tucker Carlson trying to remind the former Fox host of the fun dinner Matt and one of his generous partner dates shared with him and his wife.
Speaker 4:I can say that actually you and I went to dinner about two years ago. Your wife was there and I brought a friend of mine, you'll remember her and she was actually threatened by the FBI, told that if she wouldn't cop to the fact that somehow I was involved in some pay for play scheme, that she could face trouble.
Speaker 1:Awkward. Now, obviously, if you're going to engage in illegal prostitution and record everything on Venmo, you're going to want a good lawyer, but if you want a great lawyer, my law firm, the Eagle Team, can help. If you've gotten in a car crash, suffered a data breach, especially got one of those data breach letters saying that your information might have been leaked, or are dealing with a workers' comp or social security issue, we can represent you or help find you the right attorney. It's so important to talk to a lawyer right away so you can maximize your recovery. And, by the way, we don't get paid unless you do so. There's nothing up front. So just click on the link in the description or call the phone number on screen for a free consultation with my team, because you don't just need a legal team, you need the Eagle Team. So click below.
Speaker 2:Gates claimed that he and his father had been victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25 million. While threatening to smear my name, he said that his father had been cooperating with federal authorities in this matter and wearing a wire at the FBI's direction to catch these criminals, and that part turned out to be more or less true. See, matt Gaetz has a little touch of the Nepo baby about him, if you can even believe it. In fact, his daddy, don Gaetz, was a highly successful businessman who served as president of the Florida State Senate between 2012 and 2014. On March 16, 2021, with rumors swirling that Gates would be indicted, his father got a text from a former Air Force intelligence officer named Bob Kent, saying that his son, matt, was about to be federally indicted, but he, kent, had a plan to make his future legal and political problems go away. Now stick with me here, because this one's really crazy.
Speaker 2:Kent and his backer, florida businessman Stephen Alford, were obsessed with a former FBI agent named Robert Levinson, who went missing in Iran in 2007. Levinson was reportedly on a CIA mission, but he was in poor health and in 2020, the government told his family that they should presume he was dead, which they did, filing a wrongful death suit against the Iranian government and securing a $1.4 billion reward to be paid out of Iranian assets frozen in US coffers since 1980. But for reasons not entirely clear, alfred and Kent thought that Levinson was alive, or they said they did anyway. So they texted Don Gates if you and your son are willing to help us, privately and clandestinely, obtain the release of Robert Levinson, I will ensure that Matt is on the plane that delivers Levinson to his family, thus making him the most sought-after public figure in the world for his efforts to obtain Levinson's release. Then my partner will see to it that Matt receives a presidential pardon, thus alleviating all his legal issues".
Speaker 2:I think the theory here was that if Gates was somehow the guy who brought Levinson home, biden would have to pardon him, because you're allowed to commit sex crimes if you're a national hero. All they wanted from Don Gates was a $25 million loan to be repaid out of the federal reward. Alford and Kent dubbed the plan Project Homecoming and laid out the details in a memo which they delivered to Don Gates. But of course, papa Gates wasn't an idiot. He immediately called the FBI to report that he was being extorted and was presumably wearing that wire the whole time, as his son had said. Alford was indicted in 2021 and pled guilty to one count of wire fraud. He's currently a guest of the United States government and will be for a couple more years at least, none of which has anything to do with whether or not Matt Gaetz committed crimes, but it doesn't make it easier to indict him. What it did was allow him to throw glitter in the air and claim that he was being targeted by the DOJ.
Speaker 4:What is happening is an extortion of me and my family involving a former Department of Justice official. Tonight, I am demanding that the Department of Justice and the FBI release the audio recordings that were made under their supervision and at their direction, which will prove my innocence.
Speaker 2:On April 9th 2021, the House Ethics Committee announced that it was investigating public allegations that Representative Matt Gaetz may have engaged in sexual misconduct and or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use and or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity or impermissible gift in violation of house rules, laws or other standards of conduct. That investigation got sidelined for two years after the Justice Department asked the Ethics Committee to back off and let the criminal investigation take precedence. And that's look. It's not crazy. If you're a prosecutor, you don't want your witnesses destroying their credibility by saying one thing in congressional testimony and another to you. But that delayed the congressional investigation until 2023, when the Republicans took back the House.
Speaker 2:Now, gates was known as a blowhard and a bomb thrower among Republicans, but he was Trump's guy and he figured that meant Republicans would go to bat for him, including then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Mccarthy was incredibly vulnerable because Republicans had won by the slimmest of margins in 2022. It took 15 rounds of votes to confirm him as speaker, and that only happened after he granted huge concessions to some of the most aggressive members of his own caucus, including Gates. Essentially, mccarthy gave them the ability to call a snap vote on his leadership at any time. Gates seemed to think that McCarthy owed it to him to put a stop to the ethics investigation, or at least Gates figured that McCarthy's precarious position gave him leverage to make the demand. But McCarthy refused to play ball. Matt is upset about an ethics complaint.
Speaker 4:I don't care what they threaten against me. I am not going to interject into an independent committee like Athens.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, behind the scenes, gates was stonewalling the committee. After McCarthy made those comments, gates wrote a letter in September accusing the committee of doing McCarthy's bidding, after he publicly signaled to you to put the heat on and instructed you to shoot your shot. In October, gates led a successful effort to push McCarthy out of the job, after which Gates switched to claiming that the ethics committee's Republicans were on a mission to avenge McCarthy. It was an attempt to inject politics into the process by accusing the committee of playing politics. In reality, the committee was doing its job and the stuff that it uncovered while it was doing its job was awful. Okay, top line. The committee found substantial evidence that Representative Gates had sex with victim A in July 2017, when she was 17 years old and he was 35. Representative Gates's actions were in violation of Florida's statutory rape law. So there you go. That's who Trump wanted to put in charge of the Justice Department.
Speaker 2:But aside from that, it's clear that Gates and Greenberg paid at least 12 young women for sex and drugs. One of those women included his girlfriend of two years, whom Gates met through seeking arrangement when she was 21 and he was 35. Their relationship was not exclusive and she seems to have corralled other young women to send Gates drugs and to entertain him and his friends. She's woman one on this table receiving almost $64,000. Other women interviewed by the committee testified that woman one would often provide drugs at parties, and woman one whose lawyers were paid by Gates repeatedly took the fifth when she was interviewed by the committee. Gates himself also relied on the girls to bring him drugs. And okay, maybe you're of the opinion that sex work should be legal and drug laws are stupid Fair. The problem is that these very young women were plied with drugs and alcohol in situations where it's not clear that they were really able to consent to having sex with multiple men and women in an evening. The committee wrote.
Speaker 2:While all the women that the committee interviewed stated their sexual activity with Representative Gates was consensual, at least one woman felt that the use of drugs at the parties and events they attended may have impaired their ability to really know what was going on or fully consent. Indeed, nearly every woman that the committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gates and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption. The girl, who was 17 at the time of her encounters with Gates, testified to the committee that when I look back on certain moments I feel violated. I thought all these people were my friends. I know now that they're not and, as exploitative as that was, gates and Greenberg didn't always pay up as promised. Here's Gates's girlfriend woman one explaining that the guys are a little limited in their cash flow this weekend. So Matt was like if it can be more of a customer appreciation week, so if you had on your bingo card guy most likely to demand a freebie from a teenage sex worker, hey congrats. Other texts show him docking the compensation for one woman because he didn't think she'd stayed long enough, which kind of undercuts the claim for most of these women that this wasn't prostitution or, as Gates put it, sending funds to women he dated. And in fact, the committee said plainly that Gates enticed and procured women to engage in sexual activity for hire and purchased the services of women engaging in sexual activity for hire, in violation of Florida state law. Note that's a state law and not a federal law.
Speaker 2:The committee investigated whether Gates participated in sex trafficking, particularly with regard to a trip to the Bahamas in 2018. Gates and two other men spent three days partying with six women, the youngest of whom was 18. Gates is reported to have taken ecstasy and had sex with at least four of the women on that trip. At other times, he paid for women to come from Florida to DC or New York, including in January of 2019, when Gates appeared as a guest host on the Fox News show Outnumbered. After he went on air to call Senator Elizabeth Warren a sack of Jueya, the group went to a Broadway show. A lawyer for one of the women told ABC that the show was Pretty Woman, which is honestly a little too on the nose.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, the committee concluded that they did not find sufficient evidence to conclude that Representative Gates violated the federal sex trafficking statute. Although Representative Gates did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex, the committee did not find evidence that any of those women were under 18 at the time of travel. Nor did the committee find sufficient evidence to conclude that the commercial sex acts were induced by fraud, force or coercion. They did, however, find that Gates violated House rules on accepting gifts. He failed to disclose that he flew back from the Bahamas on a private plane a gift valued in excess of the $250 limit under the House gift rule.
Speaker 2:Gates tried to hide this by indignantly pointing to his travel itinerary, which showed him flying out of Washington Dulles Airport on a commercial flight. When the committee pointed out that he'd forgotten to say how he got home, he got very snotty. He said my travel to the Bahamas was a result of my purchase of American Airlines tickets with my personal funds, and it goes without saying that I was not reimbursed by anybody. Does the committee also have an interest in every dollar I spent in the Bahamas on food, refreshments and other travel provisions, such as sunscreen? That was one of the reasons the committee found that Gates obstructed the investigation, violating his duty of candor as a member of Congress.
Speaker 2:They also found that he violated congressional rules with respect to constituent services, using official resources to help a woman he was having sex with expedite her passport renewal. In fact, she wasn't his constituent at all. It was incredibly damning, and the committee members also had some very harsh words for the Justice Department. Remember how the Ethics Committee delayed its own investigation by two years to avoid interfering with the DOJ's criminal inquiry. That inquiry was closed without charge, which Gates pointed to as evidence of his complete exoneration. That's not what that means, but let's come back to that one in a minute. The committee said that many of the women it interviewed also gave statements to DOJ and urged the committee to rely on those statements in lieu of requiring them to relive their experience. They were particularly concerned with providing additional testimony about a sitting congressman in light of DOJ's lack of action on their prior testimony. The report complained that DOJ refused to provide the relevant statements and other significant evidence to the committee.
Speaker 2:Doj cited internal policies about protecting uncharged suspects like Representative Gates, general concerns about how DOJ's cooperation with the committee may deter other victims in other matters and various inapposite policies relating to congressional oversight of DOJ itself. But that's mostly part of a for lack of a better term ongoing pissing match between Congress and the executive branch, because Congress always wants to get its hands on investigative materials in high profile cases and the DOJ never wants to give it to them. In some cases that's because it can't. It's illegal to disclose grand jury materials without permission of the court, but it would be terrible public policy for Congress to be able to seize and publish internal police investigations of people who were never charged. Who would ever talk to the FBI if that were a possible outcome and there's just no way to make an exception to this rule that only covers villains like Matt Gaetz exception to this rule that only covers villains like Matt Gaetz. So yeah, you can sympathize with the women here who would have preferred not to be interviewed again by Congress, but you kind of have to put that criticism in context.
Speaker 2:But let's come back to Gaetz's claim of exoneration, because a lot of people have said that the Justice Department screwed up by not indicting him, and that includes the committee which accused the DOJ of not doing right by the 17-year-old girl who cooperated with the DOJ's investigation for years and was let down by the justice system when reports circulated that the DOJ would be unlikely to pursue charges against Representative Gates. First of all, we have no idea why Gates wasn't charged Again, we haven't seen the internal investigative materials, but we can make some educated guesses. We haven't seen the internal investigative materials, but we can make some educated guesses. For one thing, the Fed's key witness is Joel Greenberg, who did all the cooperating he possibly could have done, delaying his sentence multiple times and he's still got 11 years. When Judge Gregory Presnell sentenced him, he said he'd never seen a defendant who has committed so many different types of crime within a relatively short period, like those crimes committed by Mr Greenberg. To say that Greenberg has credibility problems is a massive understatement, and the committee itself said that it would not rely exclusively on information provided by Mr Greenberg in making any findings.
Speaker 2:Second, the Mann Act, which prohibits transporting individuals across state and national lines for the purposes of prostitution, is a problematic statute for a whole host of reasons. Let's start with the fact that it was originally known as the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, and one of the first successful prosecutions was of heavyweight champion boxer Jack Johnson, who was black and faced repeated arrests under the Mann Act for traveling in the company of white women. It's historically been used to criminalize sexual relationships that society finds unacceptable, by characterizing them as prostitution and or sex trafficking. And although the law has been amended, it's still so broad that the Justice Department charges under the Mann Act only where there is evidence of a victim of severe forms of trafficking in persons. And whatever you think of Gates, this is clearly not that. Third, the ethics report itself didn't find that Gates violated any federal laws. The youngest woman who traveled with him to the Bahamas was 18, so there was no trafficking of a minor. And if you can't charge under the Mann Act, then the only thing left was violation of Florida state laws. I mean, okay, sure, maybe the feds could have indicted him for the molly or for having the women mail him marijuana cartridges. But come on, as the ethics committee concluded, gates violated House rules which are not prosecutable, and he violated Florida statutory rape and prostitution laws. So maybe the real question here isn't why didn't Attorney General Merrick Garland indict Gates, it's why didn't Florida prosecutors do it, since they had access to the same media reports suggesting that he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex that Congress and the DOJ did. There was nothing stopping state's attorneys in Florida from stepping up to the plate here, and they don't even appear to have investigated. So while you're looking at people to be mad at, maybe direct your age a little further south.
Speaker 2:Matt Gaetz had at least a week's notice that this thing was going to drop on Monday, the 23rd, but he still waited until that morning to file a motion in federal court in DC demanding that the committee not release the report. The case was always doomed to fail. The courts really do not get to tell Congress how to conduct its business. It's kind of fundamental to the Constitution, but the way it went down was exceptionally silly. The case was immediately flagged for being procedurally defective in three different ways.
Speaker 2:At about 10.30 am, the report went live on the Ethics Committee website, at which point Judge Ahmed Mehta demanded that Gates explain why this matter should not be dismissed with prejudice for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. Insofar as the case appears to be moot. In light of the House Ethics Committee's public disclosure of the report whose release plaintiff seeks to enjoin, gaetz was forced to admit that his complaint was indeed moot and Judge Mehta dismissed the case before close of business. Gaetz spent that Monday tweeting through it and has since reposted messages from hundreds of supportive fans. He's also floating a plan to take the oath of office on January 3rd, offer a resolution to expose all congressional sexual harassment settlements and then resign to start his new gig at OAN. And since his political action committee is still fundraising, it seems entirely plausible that he'll go through with his plan to run for Florida governor in 2026. And okay, yes, florida does have the opportunity to do the craziest thing possible here, but maybe just this once don't.