Gaetz Openly Considers Running for Rubio’s Senate Seat

Disgraced former congressman Matt Gaetz is openly contemplating the possibility of running for Senate and trying to fill the Florida Senate seat that may be vacated by Sen. Marco Rubio, whom Trump has tapped to be his secretary of state.

“Many have asked which perch I will be fighting from next… My fellow Floridians have asked me to eye the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. Maybe special counsel to go after the insider trading from my former colleagues in Congress,” Gaetz told the crowd during his speech Sunday at Turning Point Action’s AmeriFest in Phoenix. “It seems I may not have had enough support in the United States Senate. Maybe I’ll just run for Marco Rubio’s vacant seat in the United States Senate and join some of those folks.”

This earned him raucous cheers from the audience, although whether Gaetz is seriously considering running for Senate is not yet known.

Gaetz stepped down from his seat in Congress after Trump nominated him for attorney general and mere days before an ethics report on his alleged misconduct was set to be released. Although Congress typically does not release ethics reports on former members, the committee secretly voted to do so in Gaetz’s case and is expected to share the report with the public on Monday despite GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson saying the report should remain private because Gaetz had resigned. Gaetz has since withdrawn his name from consideration for attorney general.

The House Ethics Committee investigated Gaetz for allegedly having sex with a minor, using drugs and bribery. A woman who attended a party in 2017 with Gaetz told the Ethics Committee that she witnessed Gaetz having sex with a minor, according to her lawyer. The attorney further said that Gaetz paid the witness and another woman to have sex with him. Gaetz has denied the allegations, calling the investigation a “smear campaign.” Gaetz was also investigated by law enforcement after his longtime friend, Joel Greenberg, pled guilty to sex trafficking a minor in 2021. Greenberg admitted that he introduced a 17-year-old girl to “other adult men, who engaged in commercial sex acts.”

If Rubio is confirmed as Trump’s secretary of state, then Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will name a successor, which the governor said he will do in early January. Gaetz is not thought to be under consideration for that role.

Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who was co-chair of the Republican National Convention this past summer, recently removed her name from consideration to temporarily replace Rubio, saying she was “truly humbled by the unbelievable support shown to me by the people of our country, and here in the great state of Florida.”

Whether Gaetz has a political future could be decided by what is included in the ethics report when it is released.