Somewhere, Bill Clinton is shaking his head a little and chuckling appreciatively.
And the big news:
Matt Gaetz Elopes to California, Marries Girlfriend
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida eloped to Southern California, marrying his girlfriend Ginger Luckey in a small ceremony on Catalina Island.
And I thought he was going to marry the 17 year old–as a wife cannot be compelled to testify against her husband.
Since it’s traditional for the wife to take the husband’s last name, she’s Un-Luckey in more ways than one.
Her name is going to sound like a political scandal, as it should.
By going from “Ginger Luckey” to “Ginger Gaetz”, she managed to make her name sound even more like a porn actress screen name.
Maybe hyphenated? “Ginger Gaetz-Lucky”…
I’ll admit it, this is where my impertinent brain went.
I’ve read that Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had a pretty sick thing going, where when they were both older she would do lesbian seductions of much younger women and lure them back to Sartre for him to use sexually, with both of them glorying in the lascivious details and speaking scornfully of the women. I’ve never been able to respect the writings of either one since then.
Does that apply to things that happened before the nuptials?
He posted on twitter a somewhat unflattering picture of her sleeping on the plane before the wedding. Her mouth was open and her head was lolling back.
I can’t imagine being okay with him doing that. He’s such a putz.
Post of the day. 
No, it doesn’t. " It covers communications made during the marriage, and cannot be invoked to protect confidential communications between currently married spouses which occurred prior to their marriage."
But as a matter of practice I don’t think prosecuting attorneys prosecute this type of crime where they later marry.
For the win!
Maybe we should start a pool betting on what date the divorce will take place.
Would an annulment count for such a pool?
Sure, along with faking her own death and/or running off to a nunnery.
The FBI needs to flirt with and threaten Gaetz and Greenberg into turning themselves in and providing information against the other. Following, they need to confirm the information given to them by the suspects (whose words are not implicitly held up as automatic truth and reliability), which means thinking up ways to independently confirm what they’ve been told, flirt/threaten some other folks, write up requests to a judge/grand jury for warrants, issue warrants to various banks and internet companies, schedule interviews with witnesses, do some legal research, etc.
If these things are all somewhat dependent on one another, you can’t go to the next step until you’ve completed the previous step. Maybe the judge doesn’t have an opening for a hearing for two weeks, maybe he takes a week to issue a warrant, maybe Facebook has a two week turnaround on warrant responses, maybe your witness is out of town and can’t meet until next month, etc.
If it’s taking a long time, probably Greenberg offered allegations of more criminal activities.
In general, the more crimes you can pin on the guy, the more plausible it’s going to be that he is the sort of person to do all those things.
If he says, “I thought she was 18.” The jury is a lot less likely to believe him if the FBI has pictures of him snorting coke and cheating on his taxes, regardless that those things are unrelated.
And, in general, the more crimes you have evidence of the more you want to throw in just because a) that’s your job and b) you can never know which things the jury is going to find more compelling than other things.
Somewhat on-topic, my governor (Murphy of NJ) has been referring to Matt Gaetz as Matt Putz:
I’m not going to say I approve of such childish name-calling by a governor, but I’m not going to say I don’t approve either…
Understandable if not commendable for Gov. Murphy. And, given Covid numbers in Florida, I think it’s DeSantis who needs to consult with Murphy, and not the other way 'round.
Gaetz did what was really important for members of organized crime to do before getting married, he got approval from his Don.
Rep. Matt Gaetz said he asked for former President Donald Trump’s approval before proposing to his now-wife Ginger Luckey, with whom he eloped over the weekend amid a federal sex trafficking probe.
The Florida Republican, 39, and Luckey, 26, met at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in March 2020 and the two got engaged at the same Trump-owned resort on December 30, 2020.
“You never want to upstage the big guy,” Gaetz told Vanity Fair, adding that Trump called him and his then-fiance “a dynamic duo” and sent a bottle of his company’s champagne to their table.