More on Matt Gaetz

A Justice Department investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and an indicted Florida politician is focusing on their involvement with multiple women who were recruited online for sex and received cash payments.

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Investigators believe Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector in Seminole County, Fla., who was indicted last year on a federal sex trafficking charge and other crimes, initially met the women through websites that connect people who go on dates in exchange for gifts, fine dining, travel and allowances, according to three people with knowledge of the encounters.

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One of the sites [...] was called Seeking Arrangement, which describes itself as a place where wealthy people find attractive companions and pamper them “with fine dinners, exotic trips and allowances.” The site’s founder has said it has 20 million members worldwide.

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Mr. Greenberg introduced the women to Mr. Gaetz, who also had sex with them, the people said.

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One of the women who had sex with both men also agreed to have sex with an unidentified associate of theirs in Florida Republican politics.

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The Justice Department inquiry is also examining whether Mr. Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl and whether she received anything of material value, according to four people familiar with the investigation. The sex trafficking count against Mr. Greenberg involved the same girl, according to two people briefed on the investigation.The Times has reviewed receipts from Cash App, a mobile payments app, and Apple Pay that show payments from Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg to one of the women, and a payment from Mr. Greenberg to a second woman. The women told their friends that the payments were for sex with the two men.

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In encounters during 2019 and 2020, Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg instructed the women to meet at certain times and places, often at hotels around Florida, and would tell them the amount of money they were willing to pay, according to the messages and interviews.

One person said that the men also paid in cash, sometimes withdrawn from a hotel ATM.

Some of the men and women took ecstasy, an illegal mood-altering drug, before having sex, including Mr. Gaetz

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Some of the men and women took ecstasy, an illegal mood-altering drug, before having sex, including Mr. Gaetzes has reviewed receipts from Cash App, a mobile payments app, and Apple Pay that show payments from Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Greenberg to one of the women, and a payment from Mr. Greenberg to a second woman. The women told their friends that the payments were for sex with the two men.

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In some cases, Mr. Gaetz asked women to help find others who might be interested in having sex with him and his friends, according to two people familiar with those conversations. Should anyone inquire about their relationships, one person said, Mr. Gaetz told the women to say that he had paid for hotel rooms and dinners as part of their dates.

  ABC

Which is also what he told Tucker Carlson.

No charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz, and the extent of his criminal exposure is unclear. Mr. Gaetz’s office issued a statement on Thursday night in a response to a request for comment.

“Matt Gaetz has never paid for sex,” the statement said. “Matt Gaetz refutes all the disgusting allegations completely. Matt Gaetz has never ever been on any such websites whatsoever. Matt Gaetz cherishes the relationships in his past and looks forward to marrying the love of his life.”

LOL. He did it all.

It is not illegal to provide adults with free hotel stays, meals and other gifts, but if prosecutors think they can prove that the payments to the women were for sex, they could accuse Mr. Gaetz of trafficking the women under “force, fraud or coercion.”

I don't care what he did with those women, as long as it was consenual, but lying about it is bad form.

It is also a violation of federal child sex trafficking law to provide someone under 18 with anything of value in exchange

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[Greenberg] potentially faces decades in prison on three dozen charges. The U.S. attorney’s office in Central Florida initially secured an indictment against Mr. Greenberg in June, alleging that he had stalked a political rival and had used his elected office to create fake identification cards.for sex, which can include meals, hotels, drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. A conviction carries a 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.

Gaetz has an automatic out on the underage trafficking count by saying the 17-year-old presented him a fake ID, unless she personally claims he knew how old she was.

Mr. Greenberg was indicted this week on additional charges, accusing him of submitting false claims to receive pandemic relief aid from the government and trying to bribe a government official.

I wonder if Gaetz helped him.

Mr. Gaetz said this week that his lawyers had been in touch with the Justice Department and that he was the subject, not the target, of an investigation. Subjects of investigations are often witnesses or people who might have information that could help the government pursue its targets. But it is common for that designation to shift over the course of an investigation.

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Mr. Gaetz has sought to divert attention from the Justice Department investigation by claiming that he and his father were the targets of an extortion plot by two men trying to secure funding for a separate venture.

The men — Robert Kent, a former Air Force intelligence officer who runs a consulting business, and Stephen Alford, a real estate developer who has been convicted of fraud — approached Mr. Gaetz’s father, Don Gaetz, about funding their efforts to locate Robert A. Levinson, an American hostage held in Iran. They suggested to Don Gaetz that Mr. Levinson’s successful return could somehow be used to secure a pardon for Matt Gaetz if he were charged with federal crimes, according to a copy of their proposal provided to The Times.

Soon after, Don Gaetz hired a lawyer and contacted the F.B.I.

Mr. Kent denied the Gaetzes’ assertions. He said he had heard rumors that Matt Gaetz might be under investigation and mentioned them only to sweeten his proposal. “I told him I’m not trying to extort, but if this were true, he might be interested in doing something good,” Mr. Kent said in an interview.

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[Kent] was stunned when he heard that Matt Gaetz had sought to tie the Justice Department investigation to an extortion plot related to the Levinson case.

“He threw Levinson and the entire Levinson family under the bus,” Mr. Kent said. “I can’t imagine what these poor people have been through. This guy, to divert attention from himself, has raked up the attention to the family.”

Don Gaetz also taped a phone call and a meeting with David McGee, a Levinson family lawyer, where they discussed the rescue proposal. In an interview, Mr. McGee denied any involvement and suggested Matt Gaetz was conflating the matter inappropriately with his own potential criminal liability.

“He’s trying to distract attention from a pending tidal wave that is about to sink his ship,” Mr. McGee said.

Oh, what tangled webs we weave...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why doesn't the US want to find Bob Levinson?

On December 10, 2018, a former Air Force intelligence officer named Bob Kent was planning to board a plane in New York for the Middle East on a most improbable secret mission: freeing Robert Levinson from Iran.

Levinson, an ex–FBI agent well into a second career as a private detective, had disappeared over a decade earlier from a hotel on Iran’s Kish Island. He had been seen only twice since then, first in a hostage video his family received from unknown intermediaries in 2010, then in photos three years later, showing the then-63-year-old increasingly haggard and begging for help.

At first, the U.S. government claimed it had no knowledge of why Levinson, an expert on Russian organized crime, had gone to Iran. [...] But in 2013, the Associated Press and other news outlets revealed that the ex-agent had gone to Kish on an off-the-books CIA mission to probe high-level Iranian money laundering.

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He was an embarrassment to both the FBI and CIA. The possibility also existed that rival factions in Iran had not been able to agree on his release after years of denying it had him.

  Newsweek

Being fairly ignorant of some undercover escapades, I wonder why looking for Iranian money laundering would have to be off-the-books.

March 9 will mark the 12th anniversary of [Levinson's] disappearance.

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Kent would be just the latest in a chain of unlikely players in the hunt for the missing man, including a onetime Iranian assassin, a retired detective with CIA connections, an ex–FBI agent, a former federal prosecutor, a Philadelphia truck driver and Russian mobsters.

And why are Russian mobsters looking for him?

One such was Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum tycoon who would be sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for “a range of malign activity around the globe.” A decade earlier, hoping he might earn points toward solving his visa problems with the U.S., “Deripaska announced he was willing to fund a search [for Levinson] and pay any ransom needed to free Bob,” according to Meier’s authoritative account. “Bureau officials were elated.” In the end, nothing came of it.

Deripaska is also a name involved in the Trump-Russia collusion case.

The same offer came from an even more odious Russian figure with U.S. legal problems. Notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, who occupies a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in connection with an alleged massive stock swindle, telegraphed U.S. officials through intermediaries that he would finance a Levinson rescue effort. The involvement of Mogilevich, often dubbed “the most dangerous criminal in the world,” was hugely ironic: As an FBI agent and private investigator, Levinson had been tracking Mogilevich for years. “I don’t know his motivation,” Kent says of Mogilevich, but “he backed out.“

Downright weird.

Kent’s mission, like all the other private efforts to locate and win Levinson’s release, came to nil. Not for lack of resources—money men “with CIA connections,” as three sources involved in the case described them, had offered to pay Kent’s Iranian helpers $100,000 for a proof-of-life package, including fingerprints, a blood sample and what they claimed was a recent, 41-second video clip of Levinson, who would be 71 on March 10. “Another $150,000” would be needed “for the rescue,” Kent says. But just as Kent readied to leave for the airport three months ago, the federal government got in the way, he says, refusing to issue the Americans a waiver from the Trump administration’s sanctions on Iran to permit the payments.

Now that's downright puzzling. The US government, apparently, does not want this man to be found. Why?

“I received a phone call informing me that the funding was withdrawn because the State Department and/or FBI threatened my sponsors” with prosecution, Kent tells Newsweek.

To Levinson family attorney David McGee, a former federal prosecutor who had several meetings with government officials on the case over the years, the last-minute abort of Kent’s mission fit a long pattern of official neglect and sometimes outright interference in efforts to free the former FBI agent.

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“He was taken by enemies of this country while in its service. There is no moral justification for their failure to do what is necessary to bring him home.”

There must be a political one.

“While we cannot discuss how we handle particular investigations, over the past 12 years, the FBI has worked diligently to follow every credible lead to determine the whereabouts of Bob Levinson and will continue to do so,” the bureau says in a statement to Newsweek. “Bob spent 22 years serving as an FBI special agent, and as we mark the anniversary of his disappearance, our resolve to find him only increases.”

Meanwhile, the bureau has posted a $5 million reward for "information that could lead to Bob Levinson’s safe return."

So either the FBI is lying, or it's the Estate Department who threatened prosecution. The FBI announced it was raising the reward from $1M to $5M three years ago.

Hoping to land a government intelligence contract, [Kent] reached out to FBI counterterrorism agents. But they were skeptical about his sources, he says; as a kind of test, they “sarcastically” told him to "find Bob Levinson." Two months later, he came back with assurances he could obtain proof-of-life evidence and perhaps even more.

Kent’s main FBI contact (a counterterrorism agent whose name Newsweek is withholding at the bureau’s request) “thanked me for sharing my information, promised to investigate the background information I shared and told me repeatedly that arranging the proof-of-life meeting in Iraq would be ‘incredibly complex,’” Kent says. The agent said he would get back with an update within 10 days. He also “recommended I not contact McGee,” Kent says—the FBI privately dismisses the lawyer as “a meddler”—but Kent rejected the suggestion. Since July, he’s been “working for McGee pro bono,” he says.

Months went by without further word from the FBI.

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[I]n an early February [2019] meeting, Kent and McGee had with several officials at the State Department, Robert O’Brien, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, told them that if OFAC cleared the deal and the Defense Department authorized it, the Joint Special Operations Command might be able to assist with the Levinson mission.

McGee soon got a personal meeting scheduled with a sanctions official at Treasury to pursue the waiver issue. At the last minute, however, the department canceled the February 8 appointment. [...] (A Treasury spokesman asked that Newsweek not identify the official by name and refused to discuss the case further.) Kent’s appeals to various congressional offices were also fruitless.

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A former senior intelligence official responsible for Iran tells Newsweek the government believes, privately, that Levinson is dead. Officially, it maintains he’s alive, with the FBI calling the 12th anniversary of his disappearance “an opportunity for the leadership of the government of Iran to demonstrate its commitment to basic freedoms and civil rights and return Mr. Levinson home to his family.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Left Behind

The FBI has increased its reward for information on missing American Robert Levinson from $1 million to $5 million, it announced Monday.

Levinson, a retired FBI agent, vanished after traveling to the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 and is one of the longest-held U.S. citizens in history.

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It's unclear exactly who is holding him, but U.S. officials have said they believe he is somewhere in southwest Asia.

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Iran's government repeatedly has said it is not holding Levinson and does not know his whereabouts. The FBI says he was in Iran as a private investigator.

But news reports in 2013 said he was working as an independent CIA contractor when he disappeared.

That prompted his family to speak out, saying they kept it quiet for years that Levinson was working for the CIA, because the U.S. government had warned them that revealing it would put him in more jeopardy.

  CNN

Another family buffaloed. It’s not like whoever took him in Iran didn’t know he was CIA. The US government don’t like to acknowledge when one of theirs is captured. Code of the CIA: we will disavow any knowledge, etc.

The FBI, White House and CIA have not publicly acknowledged any connection between the CIA and Levinson.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.