It's no secret that Donald Trump regretted picking Jeff Sessions as attorney general the first time he was president. He eventually soured on Sessions replacement Bill Barr, too. So as Trump set out to assemble his new cabinet, the prevailing notion was that he would pick someone ultra loyal to be the nation's top law enforcement official. The only question was who?

Welcome to The Lead. I'm Jake Tapper. And let me begin the show by uttering some words that I never contemplated using together before. And those words are U.S. Attorney General Matt Gaetz.

Well, now Trump has his guy and seems dead set on getting former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz confirmed no matter what. Despite allegations of sexual misconduct, which he's denied.

Theres's new reporting tonight that the president elect has been calling senators, lobbying them directly for their support, telling allies how determined he is to get Gates confirmed.

And now as a key House committee decides whether to release a report on Gaetz's conduct. Senate Republicans will have to decide whether they can stomach a yes vote. My guest is CNN Capitol Hill reporter Sarah Ferris. We're going to talk about how he got to this point and why Trump may have other levers to get Gates across the finish line from CNN. This is one thing. I'm David Rind.

Okay, Sarah. So Trump's pick for attorney general, the now former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, raised a lot of eyebrows when the announcement was made. And like I know, he's extremely loyal to Trump, but why has this caused such a stir on Capitol Hill?

So Matt Gaetz is famous on Capitol Hill for wanting to make a show.

I may be a canceled man in some corners. I may even be a wanted man by the Deep State.

He likes political theater. He likes to be at the center of things.

The one thing I agree with my Democratic colleagues on is that for the last eight months, this House has been poorly led, and.

He has, of course, been one of Trump's biggest defenders. But he also was the main person who forced out Kevin McCarthy last year. He single handedly triggered the no confidence vote. And so he's he is a really polarizing figure. He's very, very brilliant. Every Republican I talk to talks about how he's probably playing for DHS with everyone, including Trump.

We are on a mission to rescue and save this country. And we ride or die with Donald Trump to the end. Thank you all so much. Thank you for having me. Let's go get them!

But he is just not someone who people generally have thought of as someone qualified for the nation's chief law enforcement officer.

Federal investigators are looking into Gates's role in connection to alleged prostitution as part of a wider probe of one of the congressman's friends.

And to top it off, he's been under investigation for alleged sex trafficking, which is becoming a huge part of of the confirmation battle that we're expected to see over the next few months.

Yeah, What exactly are these allegations?

So he's been under federal investigation over allegations involving sex trafficking and prostitution, including whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17 year old girl last year. Senator Mark Mullen told CNN's Money Roger that Matt Gaetz was showing videos on the House floor, quote, Of all the girls he had slept with.

There's a reason why no one in the conference came defended him because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor that all of us had walked away of the girls that he had slept with. He bragged about how he would crush any medicine and chase it with with a energy drink so he could go all night.

This is so these are things that members of Congress who are now going to be in charge of his confirmation have been hearing about even directly from him. Gates, of course, has denied all allegations of wrongdoing. Federal investigators, as I mentioned, had looked into this, but they ultimately decided not to bring charges. There were some questions about whether the witnesses would hold up to scrutiny. And so so now the only way we see more of these details coming out is through the House Ethics Committee, which has drafted its own report. They've interviewed a lot of people who are familiar with this behavior. But but really, this is kind of a black box. We don't we don't know what it says. And that's basically what everyone on Capitol Hill is talking about right now.

What about Matt Gaetz? What is your reaction to him being.

I was shocked when he has been nominated.

Is that a bold or is that a concerning choice?

I have nothing to add.

The Trump administration shocked Washington when it announced that Matt Gaetz was going to be Trump's pick for attorney general. And within just a few hours, we learned that Gates actually had been picked just a day or two before the Ethics Committee was scheduled to meet and vote to release the report.

So we're getting close to an end game of sorts here.

That's right. So when we talk about how Gates is really this masterful tactical politician that includes his own future, and so when he was tapped for attorney general just days before this report was going to come out, he made the decision to resign from Congress immediately, which essentially under most precedent and in most cases, the Ethics Committee report dies when a member leaves Congress.

Because he is a private citizen now.

'Because he's not right. He's no longer a member of of Congress. He's no longer a member of the House and the House Ethics Committees jurisdiction is members of Congress, members of the House. And this committee is not well-liked. Particularly there's a lot of members who have never really rooted for the Ethics Committee here before. And all of a sudden, you're you're hearing from a lot of Democrats, even some Republicans privately, who say the Ethics Committee has a responsibility to show its cards here.

The House Ethics Committee is now expected to meet on Wednesday and they could actually decide whether to release their report on Trump's controversial attorney. Attorney general pick Matt Gaetz.

We're likely to get some clues about what the House Ethics Committee is going to do next on Wednesday. The committee is supposed to meet on Wednesday. This would be the first meeting between Republicans and Democrats on the committee since Trump tapped Gates for this position. But Republicans in the in the past have canceled meetings where they've been set to meet. So it's unclear if this will move forward. So that's that's really the question of whether this report, which we know spans years and includes many, many, many private interviews, whether that will ever come to light.

If the Senate committee wants to get the information from the House Ethics Committee, are they allowed to just ask for it? Like, how does that work between the two bodies?

This is a question that folks across Capitol Hill are still trying to figure out. The Ethics Committee is sort of a black box to Democratic and Republican leadership over the decades. There's there's a a pretty strong precedent of leadership not interfering with these investigations of leadership, not getting involved.

And I don't think the committee should make that decision because I don't want to open a Pandora's Box. We're in a we're in a different era. Like if there was a breach of this in the past, so be it. But now we live in the age of the 24 hour news cycle. Now we live in the age of social media. The politics and the dynamics are very different.

And so when you have. The Senate confirmation process involving these top senators. There's a lot of party leaders right now trying to figure out how this would work because it's not something that really has happened before.

Has Trump or any of his advisers urged you to take this position?

No, I have not discussed the ethics or President Trump. And as you know, I've spent a lot of time with him.

Even his advisers?

No, or his advisors.

There is, of course, ways to get the information, whether or not they're there all completely above board. But there are ways to as people have pointed out to me, you can direct a Senate confirmation staffer to say, you know, this is a person you should talk to or this is an incident you should look into. And there's there's ways to do that. And these are all being figured out right now.

And then, of course, say that information does kind of come out and it looks bad for Gates. Would there be enough Republicans to say, no, I'm not voting to confirm him? How deep do we think the loyalty is to Trump within the Republican Party on Capitol Hill now that they have unified control of government?

It's going to be a huge test of loyalty. It's going to be very close, watched by Trump and his team of advisors. It's going to put a lot of pressure on this incoming majority leader John Thune. It's going to put a lot of pressure on the entire Republican Senate conference, which has been until now very, very unified behind Trump. And the other thing is, it's going to depend on the depth of the allegations that are going to come out.

And just to be clear, your clients knew he had paid also your clients for sex. He was paying for sex.

The testimony before the house was, yes, they represented Gates, paid my client, both of my clients for sexual favors throughout the summer of 2017, all the way to the beginning of 2019.

And we've heard in recent days from a lawyer representing two of the women who were interviewed by this committee, and one of them told the panel that she saw Gaetz having sex with a minor.

My client testified to the House that she witnessed Representative Gates having sex with her friend and minor. She was invited to a party in July of 2017. She testified to the House that as she was walking out to the pool area, she turned to her right. And she witnessed her client I'm sorry, her friend having sex with Representative Gates and her friend at that time was 17.

So when this comes out, if it doesn't come out, this is, of course, going to force Republicans to go on the record with something like this. And it could could easily dominate these confirmation hearings.

Does your client have any idea as to whether Matt Gaetz knew.

She testified.

Yes. So she testified to the House that the representing Gaetz did not know her friend's age at the time they had sexual intercourse. And when he found out about her age, the representative stopped having sexual intercourse with her. And he only started the sexual intercourse interactions later on when she turned 18.

So then it continued again.

That's correct.

So if this is as explosive as some people are afraid it could be, then this is a whole new level of confirmation process that's going to test not just the loyalty to Trump, but test the Republican Party as a whole.

So, Sarah, obviously there's the moral question of all of this again. Matt Gaetz has denied all wrongdoing here. He denies ever having sex with a minor or paying for sex. But you could make the argument, right, that the American people deserve to know what a former congressman was up to, even if he is a private citizen now. And despite what some Republicans have said, there is some precedent for this. Like there have been Ethics Committee reports released in the past, even after a member has resigned. And some of those cases involved sexual misconduct by former members. Obviously, though, some Republicans loyal to Trump who want to see Gates installed as attorney general want this to stay quiet, even if they don't think much of Gates personally. But are there other reasons members on this committee would want to keep this under wraps?

I have a hard time believing that we will never know what is in this report. There are a lot of people who have made enemies of Matt Gates over the years. There are a lot of people who have reasons to see this come out. The question is whether Democrats in particular, will have enough motivation to go ahead and release details of this, because there's also a lot of risks to whoever decides to bring details of this report to light, because if Matt Gates is confirmed, the head of the Department of Justice has a lot of power. The head of the department Justice can make your life miserable if you are a federal official, if you are a private citizen. And there's a lot of members, Democrats and Republicans alike, who have absolutely no interest in crossing a potential attorney general, Matt Gaetz.

Have you read the final?

I'm not really getting into the particulars about the report. The key point, though, is the key point is that the Senate should have a chance to look at it, not us.

What about the general public?

I'd be open to that, too. But I think the key step, again is that the Senate gets to see it.

I see the most likely path right now as us learning the details through the Senate confirmation hearings. These are always very, very thorough hearings. The the process tends to be a bit more bipartisan in that there will be Republicans skeptical. And the Republicans are going to be digging into details, much more so than the Republicans on the House Ethics Committee. So I think the place to watch is going to be the Senate confirmation hearings, which could take months. This could be a really long dragged out process.

Well, that's what I was going to ask, because I've heard about this idea of recess appointments. Now, I don't follow Congress like you do. So this is all kind of like jargon to me. Can you explain what folks are talking about when they say recess appointments and this idea that Trump could get this nomination through without the help of the Senate?

Right. So this is an Obama era tactic that became invoke when there was a really divided Congress and a president of one party in the administration and a Senate led by a leader of an opposite party, of course, divided government, there's going to be clashes. But you know that that White House needs to get its confirmations through somehow. So we saw then President Barack Obama pushed the limits on this against then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. There was a lot of clashes on this about what was the role of Congress. What what powers did a president have to make their cabinet choices without Congress's say as actually went all the way to the Supreme Court? The Supreme Court essentially agreed that Congress does indeed have the power to have influence over a president's nominations. And this is all a long way of saying that this is this really interesting power dynamic between the White House and Congress. And in past years and past decades, the Senate leader, regardless of party, has has not wanted to simply cede this power. The Senate has seen its responsibility as not just greenlighting and rubber stamping any nominees, but truly engaging in these really thorough confirmation hearings and and really digging into the process. And that's why I have a hard time and I think a lot of reporters have a hard time seeing this recess appointments as a real possibility. We have the new Senate majority leader who was just elected. He'll be in charge in January, John Thune. He has said he's open to the idea. But this is a huge, huge shift. And I think Trump is certainly going to try to use his power there. He would be expanding his power. This is something a president doesn't normally get to do. So this will be something to watch in the early months of 2025.

So you've covered Congress for how long?

Ten years.

Ten years. So you were there when Trump was president the first time, and you and your colleagues would go for reaction from all the Republican senators and House members asking, you know, about Trump's latest tweet or latest action. And they would kind of say stuff like, I didn't see the tweet yet. Right? Yeah. Do you think we're going to get more of that this time around?

'I mean, it's like it's interesting because you don't you don't have John McCain, you don't have Lamar Alexander. You don't have like Mitt Romney. You have a lot of pretty Trumpy folks. So I think there's just like everyone's going to see what Tom DeLay says, like everyone's going to see what these vulnerable Republican senators say or these so-called moderates. There's just much fewer of them. Like, is John Curtis going to be a voice like Mitt Romney? I don't I don't think he could quite get there. You know, these are like they're all much more Trumpy in both chambers than they were in 2016.

Sarah, thanks very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producers are Felicia Patinkin and Faiz Jamil. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhart, Jamus Andrest, and Nichole Pesaru and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage and Katie Hinman. And I just quickly want to shout out one of our listeners who left a review on Apple Podcasts recently. Eddie in Vermont wrote. Each episode is a gold nugget. Short and sweet. I love to hear that. Our whole team loves to hear that. Thanks, Eddie. And keep those reviews coming, folks. Thanks for listening.