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The Matt Gaetz Story: Blackmail Operation, Distraction Attempt, or A Bunch of Convenient Coincidences involving a Naughty Congressman?
Let's go over some of the people involved:
Let's start somewhere in Florida with an ascendant failson of a wealthy family named Joel Greenberg. He gets elected as Tax Collector of Seminole County in 2016. He quickly becomes a social center for well-to-dos in central Florida. He then engages in an almost comical level of naughty behavior.
Well, it doesn't take long for authorities in FL and the federal government to take an interest in our new hotshot Tax Collector. Rumors are awash in Seminole County of the sort of behavior their first term public servant is up to, so a middle school teacher decides to challenge Mr. Greenburg in the upcoming Republican primary by the name of Brian Beute. Now, Greenberg couldn't have this interloper ruining his fun, so he set out to ruin his reputation by crafting ever escalating smears which he released on social media, e.g., pretending to be former students posting in comments on Facebook. This eventually escalated to Greenberg writing handwritten letters sent to Beute's place of employment accusing him of sexually assaulting his students. Well, those letters were turned over to the local sheriff who found both Greenberg's fingerprints and DNA on the letters and he was arrested and charged by the federal DOJ with stalking. During his arrest, the DOJ seized his cell phone and computers and discovered the mountain of naughty behavior he had been up to, the worst of which was Greenberg paying tens of thousands of dollars to at least one underage girl, 17 at the time, to have sex with him and others, including paying for their travel, which is also known as sex trafficking. As part of this scheme, Greenburg was issuing fraudulent real Florida IDs to at least one woman he was paying for sex off a sugar daddy website.
And that's where Matt Gaetz comes into the story. Matt Gates and Joel Greenberg had become friends, perhaps even good friends, years before in around 2017 after Greenberg started his term as Tax Collector for Seminole County. During his prosecution around June 2020, Greenberg or his lawyer, approached the Bill Barr DOJ claiming he can provide evidence a sitting Congressmen had engaged in sex acts with a minor. The Barr DOJ then opens a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz which remains secret for months and isn't known in public until it is leaked to the NYT in March 2021. Matt Gaetz then immediately goes onto Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News that night to respond to the leak and it's a gem for those who would like to watch. Some may remember this bizarre story being told by a sitting US Congressmen about his father being blackmailed for $25,000,000 to help free an American hostage in Iran. Many wrote this off as nuts and attacked Gaetz as crazy and yet years later the story has proved to be true. And in that bizarre story, Gaetz doesn't hesitate to name the person who tried to extort his father: David McGee.
Now who is David McGee? David McGee is a former federal prosecutor who now works at a large firm in Florida. David McGee is involved in this story because a man he had worked with while at the DOJ named Bob Levinson. Bob Levinson was a retired FBI agent who allegedly became a spy for the CIA against Iran. He disappeared in 2007 while in Iran. In the early years of the Obama administration, the FBI was trying to covertly get the retired FBI agent back by selling favors to a Russian Billionaire named Oleg Deripaska. David McGee was the liaison to work out a deal with Deripaska who would give $20,000,000 to the FBI to pay for the hostage rescue/ransom and the FBI would get him and his entire family green cards in the US. The point man for the FBI was a guy named Andrew McCabe. This deal is shut down at some point during the Obama administration and Levinson disappears. Nothing is heard about him to the point where documents confirming Levinson's employment by the CIA get leaked to the Associated Press in 2013. And still nothing comes up about Bob Levinson. Obama negotiates the Iran deal and gets 4 American hostages back from Iran as part of the negotiation, but none of them are Bob Levinson. This creates quite the scandal which received a fair amount of press because Levinson is now the longest currently held US hostage in the world. No one hears about Bob Levinson for more years and he's written off as dead. His wife sues Iran in US federal court, gets a $1,200,000,000 judgment, and the US government declares Levinson dead.
And then a former intelligence officer named Bob Kent claims to have received information that Bob Levinson is still alive. That intelligence officer contacts David McGee, the man who had previously attempted to rescue his former colleague through a scheme to sell favors to a Russian billionaire. And so a plan is hatched and now we finally get back to how this involves Matt Gaetz and the Gaetz family.
Stephen Alford, a man with a criminal record and a former client of David McGee, contacts Matt Gaetz's father Don Gaetz on March 16, 2021. The new plan is for Don Gaetz to give David McGee $25,000,000 to finance a rescue mission for Bob Levinson and in exchange unnamed government officials were going to secure a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz who was going to be charged with sex trafficking because there is currently a secret grand jury investigation into him. Don Gaetz calls Matt Gaetz who tells him to contact the local FBI office which he does. The FBI convinces him to wear a wire and talk to McGee. The details of the investigation had been kept quiet. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don requested from the FBI a written agreement detailing the purpose of the investigation, the meeting, and the cooperation, and the FBI eventually agrees and Don Gaetz gets this in writing.
And what do you know? By pure coincidence, the NYT runs a story the next day detailing the case against Matt Gaetz. A media frenzy ensues.
There are so many questions. Two months later, Joel Greenburg pleads guilty and is sentenced to 11 years in prison. The DOJ doesn't close its case against Matt Gaetz until late 2022 without ever explaining sufficiently why Gaetz wasn't charged. Matt Gaetz is now permanently tarred and his fellow congressmen are more interested in using this secret investigation to smear Gaetz instead of what could be a honeypot extortion scheme. Stephen Alford pleads guilty and is sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Joel Greenburg recruits women off of sugar daddy websites, gives them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses listing their age as 18, he then pays them to have sex with men (at least one rising star in US House of Representatives), and then uses this information to negotiate a deal with the DOJ, the DOJ uses that information to open up secret investigations into sitting Congressmen, the corrupt Florida official case is put on hold, and then at least one former DOJ official attempts to blackmail the father of a sitting congressmen with this information from a "secret" investigation, and then when the target gets solid exonerating evidence and the FBI cannot further entangle them in situations which can be portrayed against them, they then likely leak the investigation to the NYT, and the corrupt FL official pleads guilty and gets a near mandatory minimum deal on sentencing.
No one is apparently interested beyond how this could damage Matt Gaetz. David McGee and Bob Kent are uncharged. As far as I know, they weren't even seriously investigated beyond being questioned. Any time Matt Gaetz does anything, details of his case find its way to the media and a media blitz starts anew with a buzz for Matt Gaetz to resign and whatever else. The set-up, the blackmail, and the stitch-up when it fails.
I'm not sure what exactly you're getting at here. You make a few points, however, that I need to address:
What exactly do you charge them with? To be clear, while Gaetz threw the word "extortion" around, there is no extortion in this case. Extortion is when someone threatens to inflict harm unless they are paid. When the threat is to inform the authorities of criminal activity or otherwise make sensitive information public we call it blackmail, but it's still extortion, and the underlying principle is the same. There is nothing in the record suggesting that either Alford, Kent, or McGee ever threatened to do anything to either Gaetz if Don didn't come up with the money.
Alford was convicted of wire fraud. The essence of the charge is that he made false statements in order to get Don Gaetz's money. To wit, he claimed that he had contacts in the Biden administration who could secure a pardon for Matt when, in fact, he had no such contacts. Kent never made any such claims; he claimed to know someone who did, namely Alford, but unless you can prove that he had specific knowledge that Alford was lying there's no case against him for fraud. McGee's participation was minimal; when Don Gaetz brought up the pardon scheme he said that he didn't know anything about it. Alford, meanwhile, repeatedly told elaborate stories about how people owed him favors and he could get anything he wanted if they were able to bring Levinson back.
Here's the thing, though: The Feds only had jurisdiction over Alford because he made fraudulent statements via text message. If he had simply texted Don Gaetz that he wanted to meet and made the statements in person, there wouldn't be anything here other than a state level fraud charge. The Gaetz case was ultimately dropped due to evidentiary issues involving the credibility of witnesses, but there is still strong evidence of two things. First, Gaetz had surrounded himself with people who had no apparent moral compass, and, second, he was buying prostitutes off of a known sex trafficker. Whatever else has been said about him may or may not be true, but the probability of it being true is higher than it is for almost anyone else who would be considered for his position. The allegations are at least plausible enough that, in the eyes of the public, it disqualifies him from being the nation's top law enforcement officer.
Getting back to your contention that this was some kind of setup, I don't know how deep you think this goes or what it was supposed to accomplish. Gaetz's actions date to several years prior to the investigation, including those supported by documentary evidence. Are you suggesting that they were setting him up in 2017? Furthermore, if you have that evidence (or fake that evidence), then what was their goal? If the goal is to destroy Matt Gaetz's public career, just charge him and move on. What's the purpose of the hare-brained fraud scheme? Or is it your contention that the Federal Government was in such dire need of somewhere between 5 and 25 million dollars that they resorted to phonying up an investigation into a congressman so they could use a twice-convicted con man and two confederates to bilk the money out of him? Neither scenario makes sense.
This isn't a disagreement about possible charges because it's not hard to think of any number of about a dozen federal charges if a connection between Alford and Kent and McGee is made. It's about your belief there are no facts to support such a connection, except there are some small ones: Alford told the Gaetz to direct the money towards a trust account in care of David McGee, Alford claimed he was working with Kent, McGee, and others to rescue Bob Levinson, Alford's company to handle this exchange was incorporated by... David McGee. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Could this all be innocent connections? sure!
It's entirely possible a former DOJ prosecutor currently working at a large, prestigious law firm continues to involve himself in various schemes of a long-term client who has been convicted multiple times of fraud and blackmail. Perhaps McGee just takes his bar oath to heart. Of course if McGee did want to put together a blackmail scheme, a person like Alford would be the perfect bridge because his word is shit, he's a repeated felon, and he already has a history of taking the blame if the scheme falls apart.
The scheme would be David McGee would accept the money to fund the rescue effort. Kent is the one who handed Don Gaetz the "Project Homecoming" document which implies a promised presidential pardon or the investigation/indictment would be ceased. Alford was the person who connected the payment with the reward. In the middle of this investigation by a local FBI office right as it's about to get to the McGee stage, the Gaetz charges get released to the NYT and then everything stops. As soon as the scheme falls apart, Alford falls on his sword and takes all the blame.
I wonder when the FBI is going to release the full tapes or transcripts of the meetings between Don and the trio. Matt Gaetz claims there is far more on those tapes and in other documents which substantiate his accusations about McGee and Kent. I have seen nothing to convince me these allegations were seriously investigated and instead the FBI was happy to charge Alford and move on.
In the particular charge the picked, sure. That doesn't mean this was the only way they could have established jurisdiction over Alford or possible co-conspirators. This isn't some strong limitation or even much of a hurdle in the modern day and how and what communication devices are typically used. I'm not implying there is strong evidence to currently available to prove McGee or Kent knew Alford was going to send fraudulent text messages to Don Gaetz or fill out the conspiracy.
On a side note, I'm disappointed no one has made an "Alford plea" pun. It's too bad he didn't even attempt to obtain one.
Who is "they"? Our three muskateers currently being discussed? The government at large? No, I doubt it. As far as I know, there is no connection between Joel Greenberg and the trio. I'm speculating about some facts I find interesting and thought others would find them interesting as well. Other than my characterization of Joel Greenberg as looking like a honeypot operation, I'm not arguing anything in particular.
To have leverage over Matt Gaetz in order to control him in some way in the the future. I find it hard to believe you cannot fathom some other purpose of having blackmail material on someone other than to burn your blackmail material to harm that person.
The federal government wasn't in dire need of $20,000,000 in 2010 when David McGee was attempting to sell favors to a Russian Oligarch, but they did and the contention was the operation needed to be kept off of official books because the government had not admitted Bob Levinson was a likely CIA contractor or they couldn't get official approval and were attempting to save their buddy.
I don't think the entire scheme was hatched to bilk money out of Gaetz family starting from back in 2017. A plausible narrative is Greenberg was attempting to get leverage on him. Later on as that leverage was falling apart because our naughty boy Greenberg couldn't help but be a sloppy criminal who couldn't help himself to not commit a laundry list of crimes, a group of people who clearly had non-public knowledge saw an opportunity to get money out of the Gaetz family. Whether that group was large or confined to one, two, or a few is unknown.
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I believe what OP is alleging/implying is that Greenberg may have made a false allegation against Gaetz in order to save his own skin (offer to point the finger at a juicy target of a Congressman to lessen his own sentence). The implicatiom is that tbe FBI knows that this is a weak or bogus allegation, but proceed with the investigation anyway, or at least conclude as a result of the investigation that it ks bogus.
McGee, who is contected to both the Federal Prosecutor's Office and the CIA, attempts to use this knowledge to blackmail the senior Gaetz (through Alford) to get money to rescue Levinson in exchange for using his connections to get the case dropped against the junior Gaetz.
I think most people would agree that "we will drop a bogus/weak case against you in exchange for money" amounts to extortion. Rephrased, it can be "give me money and I'll won't charge you". Even with a legitimate crime being prosecuted it can still amount to extortion, as it's clearly an attempt to violate the defendant's due process rights.
Especially in the case of a high profile figure like a Congressman, there doesn't even have to be a a charge or conviction, the mere reporting that a Congressman js being investigated can be extremely damaging, which is what happened here.
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I've said it before, Gaetz has exonerated himself from being a criminal, he hasn't exonerated himself from being a sleazebag. The person in this story whose nocence of an actual crime is easiest to prove is in jail, and these kinds of investigations take forever.
The biggest scandal here appears to be sugar daddy websites allowing women under 18 to make profiles.
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I assume this was supposed to be David McGee.
I'm missing a connection here. How are McGee or Kent connected to Greenberg? How did they become aware of a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz that they could use as leverage? Is the implication that Greenberg was running a honeypot on behalf of the DoJ, and McGee was aware of it from his previous job? Did McGee even work in a position where he would be aware of a secret investigation?
How would the FBI leak an investigation being conducted by the DoJ? Isn't it more likely that someone in the DoJ found out about what the FBI was about to do with Don Gaetz (whether through official or back channels), and the DoJ leaked it instead to prevent the FBI and Gaetz from getting a wire recording of their attempted blackmail?
Thanks! I kept making that mistake for some reason and I fixed it.
I don't know of any connection between Greenberg and McGee or Kent. I don't know how McGee or Kent became aware of the DOJ investigation, but they were the people implicated in the blackmail scheme to get Don Gaetz to give them $25,000,000 to allegedly rescue the declared dead Bob Levinson. Stephen Alford was the person who allegedly initially contacted Don Gaetz to make the blackmail offer and directed him to David McGee. There is no reason to think McGee would need to be working on a secret investigation to become aware of it from his previous job, he could have simply been told by someone else.
The implication I'm making is that Greenberg's behavior looks like a honeypot operation: he was recruiting underage women, giving them fraudulent real FL ids he has access to because of his "public service," he's paying them with money no one is quite sure where it all came from, and he's paying these girls to have sex with rich and politically connected people in central Florida which he appeared to instigate friendships with. Joel Greenberg can't help himself but be a ridiculous criminal who is sloppy and gets caught.
The FBI could leak details to the NYT about an investigation they at the very least became aware of when Don Gaetz showed up at a local FBI office and told them he was being blackmailed even if we're going to pretend the FBI and DOJ don't work hand-in-glove. I'm not implying the FBI is the one who made the leak. There are all sorts of narratives one could string together with known facts and they would be supported. What's interesting is no one seems particularly interested in all these loose threads; there is a startling lack of interest in tying any of them up and instead they want to use it to attack and smear Matt Gaetz. The "loose threads" are Stephen Alford and Joel Greenberg who are both going to prison on plea deals.
I'm not trying to make any particular argument, really. I just find the whole story to be interesting and thought others may as well.
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