I think @cervaise is correct in that in order to understand the actions of Trump and his administration, you need to recognize that they are a crime family and use tactics of crime families.
That said, I don’t agree with her assessment of the Gaetz situation. The corrupt DOJ she describes was Trump’s ideation of what he wanted the DOJ to be.
But the DOJ is an incredibly big and strong institution staffed with thousands of attorneys and civil service employees, and Trump wasn’t able to fully corrupt it in four short years. As corrupt as Barr was, he did have limits - he refused to manufacture evidence of election fraud
Trump would’ve fully corrupted the DOJ if he’d won re-election - he was working on gutting the protections for non-political civil service employees and imposing loyalty tests for employment when he lost his bid for a second term (60 times!) But he wasn’t there yet.
Details are sketchy, but I’m going to make some guesses based on what I’ve heard.
Gaetz’s current problems started with an investigation of a corrupt local Florida politician named Joel Greenburg. That investigation started, somewhat ironically, because the guy had pulled some Roger Stone level dirty tricks to smear his political opponent (I believe I saw somewhere that Stone was directly involved, which adds a new dimension to the story) But he crossed a legal line and became the subject of an investigation.
That investigation turned up lots of other illegal activity. I haven’t found details but (among other things) there’s something involving underaged girls and fake drivers licenses and sugar daddies. I’m guessing maybe Greenburg was making fake drivers licenses for the teenage girls. He also may have been blackmailing or coercing them in some way.
I think Gaetz’s name came up in connection with this “sugar daddy” operation, probably as a customer - meaning he was hooked up with some very young girl(s) who agreed to date him in exchange for luxury travel and gifts. (It’s a thing, and there are online services that facilitate these relationships). He may not have known the girl was underaged - apparently the girls had fake ID’s.
Greenburg may have “targeted” Gaetz for “kompromat” by setting him up with an under-aged girl. If Greenburg was working with Stone, the Trump family may very well have been involved.
But I don’t think the DOJ was in on it. I think they legitimately found evidence of Gaetz’s relationship with an underaged girl, even if the relationship itself was engineered by political operatives. And I think the extortion plot he is whining about is what law enforcement calls “doing their jobs.”
I have no doubt that if they have evidence that Gaetz was involved with an underaged teen, they will pressure her to to admit it. That’s what investigators do. They may lie to her and tell her they have evidence they don’t. They may try to trick her into admitting guilt. There is nothing wrong with them doing this.
And it’s a complex investigation with lots of players. The DOJ may be seeking the cooperation of Gaetz and his family in the prosecution of Greenburg while simultaneously building a case against Gaetz - so the fact that Gaetz and his family are cooperating doesn’t make him innocent.
Time will tell, but this is what I anticipate being revealed.
