| President-elect Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet pick just withdrew his name for the job, eight days after Trump chose him. Why Matt Gaetz left: Trump selected the former Republican congressman to be attorney general — appalling many of the senators who were supposed to vote on his nomination. Gaetz has been under various investigations for years for sex-and-drug allegations. Some Republicans were willing to give it all a confirmation hearing and provide him with a chance to defend himself. But a steady drip of headlines about alleged drug-fueled sex parties, plus the fact he is not well-liked among Republicans in Congress, made it very difficult for Gaetz to get 50 votes in the Senate to win confirmation. What an attorney general does, real quick: An attorney general essentially serves as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. They run the Justice Department, which has the nation’s lawyers, prosecutors and investigators — such as the FBI. Why Gaetz’s scandals were so hard for him to overcome: It was the Justice Department that had been investigating Gaetz for years on whether he paid underage women for sex and illegally trafficking them across state lines. The Justice Department decided not to press charges, citing the credibility of two witnesses. Gaetz denied all of this. But a bipartisan ethics committee in the House picked up where federal investigators left off. And journalists have been uncovering more details of both investigations into Gaetz that essentially corroborate that: That federal investigation was shelved. But the House finished its report, and lawmakers were debating releasing it ahead of Gaetz’s confirmation hearings before the Senate. That would have been another problem for Gaetz — something concrete he would have to defend himself against. “While the momentum was strong,” Gaetz said on social media Thursday, “it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.” What happens next? There’s nothing in the rules that says you have to be an actual attorney to be attorney general, as one reader asked me. But experience helps. And even beyond his potential scandals, Gaetz really had none for this job. He’s been a flamethrower member of Congress whose own colleagues say he’s more interested in creating controversies (such as helping overthrow the House speaker last year) than governing. So Trump will pick another person, and the Senate will hold hearings and vote. (If they don’t acquiesce to Trump’s demands to go on break and let Trump install his nominees without their votes.) But some of Trump’s other controversial picks are also mired in sex-related controversies His Defense Department pick faces an allegation of potentially violent sexual assault: Pete Hegseth, a former weekend Fox News TV host, had been accused of sexual assault in 2017. He paid his accuser while maintaining the encounter was consensual. But there’s a newly unearthed police report from the incident, suggesting things may have been much more violent. An emergency room nurse contacted police after treating Hegseth’s accuser, The Washington Post reports. The woman said she may have been drugged and was sexually assaulted by him. The details from the report are hard to read. As The Post’s Danielle Paquette and Jonathan O’Connell report: “Her next memory was being in an unknown room with Hegseth, according to the police report. She stated that Hegseth then ‘took her phone from her hands’ and blocked the door, according to the documents. ‘JANE DOE remembered saying ‘no’ a lot,’ the report said.” Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department is accused of enabling exploitation of children: Former wrestling executive Linda McMahon “knowingly enabled” a ring announcer to sexually exploit and abuse “ring boys” in the 1980s, according to a new lawsuit by some of the alleged victims, CNN reports. She denies the allegations. Trump’s health secretary pick is accused of groping his children’s nanny: The woman said that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. groped her multiple times when she was 23. Kennedy said he doesn’t remember this. And then Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead the nation’s intelligence agencies, is having her words more closely analyzed, to reveal they echo and sometimes even match Russian disinformation. | 
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