President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement to nominate former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general has, again, thrust Mississippi Congressman Michael Guest, chairman of the House Ethics Committee, into the national spotlight.
Guest’s committee will potentially vote at its Wednesday meeting whether to release an ethics report on Gaetz. The committee, which was investigating Florida’s Gaetz over allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug exploit, was set to release the report before Gaetz abruptly resigned from Congress.
Guest is a Republican who represents Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District and has chaired the bipartisan House committee that investigates whether House members have committed ethics violations since January 2023.
Gaetz resigned last week shortly after Trump announced he planned to nominate him to lead the Department of Justice, despite having been previously investigated by the department for alleged sex trafficking crimes. The department declined to pursue criminal charges against Gaetz.
After the resignation, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that he does not want the House to make the committee’s report public because Gaetz is no longer in office.
Guest declined to comment to Mississippi Today about recent developments with the committee’s investigation into Gaetz. But the Mississippi Republican told Politico that the panel will make its own decision about releasing the report, regardless of Johnson’s opinion that it should be kept under wraps. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for the report to be provided to senators before a confirmation vote on Gaetz and-or to the public.
Guest is the former district attorney of Rankin and Madison counties. He also gained national attention when he introduced a resolution last year to expel New York Congressman George Santos from the House.
Some U.S. senators such as Republican John Cornyn of Texas have publicly called for the Ethics Committee to hand over its report of the Gaetz investigation. Neither of Mississippi’s two U.S. senators, Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith, sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but they will get to vote on the nomination if it reaches the full Senate.
Wicker, a Republican from Tupelo, told Mississippi Today that the Senate has the constitutional obligation to “provide the president with advice and consent on executive and judicial branch nominations” and he takes that responsibility seriously. He did not comment on Gaetz.
“I think that we are in a position to give President-elect Trump good advice on what is likely to work,” Wicker said. We are going to fulfill our constitutional role, and we are going to do so as friends of the president-elect and as members of a team who want him to be as successful as possible.”
Hyde-Smith, a Republican from Brookhaven, did not respond to a request for comment.
