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Matt Gaetz: “I was advocating for a different person to be the Attorney…”

Featuring: Matt Gaetz, Republican | Former U.S. House, Florida's 1st District

Matt Gaetz: Ted Cruz's Delusional 2028 Bid, the ADL, and Identity Politics Taking Over the Right

Published December 22, 2025 | Video Starts at 54:19

So I was there to be a trusted friend, and Charlie Kirk and Stephen Miller and I had talked to a number of people who wanted to be Attorney general, and we were presenting some of those. Some of those ideas to the president. I was advocating for a different person to be the Attorney General on a plane ride with the president. and he just sort of, as he has a tendency to do, said that that wasn't who he wanted, and he wanted me to do the job. (54:19–54:25)

CLAIM

Asserts that Matt Gaetz advocated for someone else to be Attorney General during a conversation with President Trump.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Matt Gaetz

“In Syria, we had troops funded by the Pentagon, fighting forces funded by the CIA.”
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“Here we would be at the conclusion of 2025 with negative net migration in this country.”
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“Have you looked at the FARA filings where the Israeli government is paying to geofence US churches so that they can propagandize evangelical…”
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“One in Every ten Americans is a millionaire now, actually.”
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“There are like 7 million American men who make their living driving today in one form or another. Those jobs are gone in the next half…”
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“In the pedagogy that is administered in a lot of places, there's incitement. Maya the martyr is a character, no doubt. And that is awful…”
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“The US Ambassador to France, Jared Kushner's father, says that anti Zionism is anti Semitism. And I don't believe that.”
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“There isn't a sufficient monetization path there. The way it is when the ADL and similarly aligned groups try to make the American people…”
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“When you're a witch hunter, you have to first convince people of the existence of witches. And so I think that for the broad goals of the…”
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“There has to be a villain. And that's what white people have become in this really threat constructed environment around identity.”
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“The Netanyahu government is doing to Israel is bad for Israel.”
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“We've lost Americans in uniform in Syria and a translator there as well.”
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“Reasonable people are asking, why are we still in Syria?”
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“Is that the next chapter here is you're welcoming a good chunk of Syria into the United States.”
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“I introduced the legislation in Congress to take all of our troops out of Syria. It was defeated overwhelmingly.”
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“There's no thing that we are fighting for there that is an achievable win.”
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“The way you get on the war committee is to be for the wars.”
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“The way to get on the Intelligence committee is to be for the intelligence apparatus.”
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“The way to get on the Agriculture committee is to be for big Food.”
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“The way to get on the Natural Resources committee is to be against natural resources.”
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“El Salvador. Nayib Bukele... I think he has total agency to just do things as he says.”
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“It's doing well. People are safe. Investment is coming.”
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“Trump has set the ethic in this country where you are not here legally, you are not welcome and a bunch of those people are going home.”
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“The U.S. state Department has a long history of trying to control what people see and hear and how they react to that.”
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“We have crossed that Rubicon long ago when you had people in the Biden administration censoring true information about vaccine side effects…”
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“You are going to see candidates on the Republican debate stage and on the Democrat debate stage. They're gonna say, I'm going to cut off all…”
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“The relationship [between the U.S. and Israel] has become too burdensome.”
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“They've also, I guess, hired Brad Parscale to spoof the AI bots.”
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“Is there anyone who believes that Israel's campaign in Gaza has killed more terrorists than it's created?”
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“More of that type of violence is visited here in the United States.”
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“Trump was scrolling Twitter regularly, he was getting bidirectional feedback that does not exist right now.”
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“I would love to see Trump back on Twitter, posting regularly and seeing the feedback from users.”
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“The news that is made on X Twitter really pollinates to those other platforms extensively and I think drives all the action.”
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“Someone was in jail [for false allegations against me].”
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“No one has ever even made an accusation against me in any forum in which I can depose witnesses, do cross examination, review records.”
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“It was an op to silence me, and Israel was involved.”
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“Someone who was getting paid by the Israeli government was involved in a criminal shakedown of a U.S. congressman.”
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“Someone, the person who conveyed this message to my father pled guilty to the attempted fraud.”
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“I represented one of the most military heavy districts in the entire country.”
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“I took the position that we should be less entangled in [Middle East wars].”
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“I was the only Republican in the entire Congress during my time there who refused all PAC and lobbyist donations.”
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“I even had groups like DNRA or Right to Life that I was largely aligned with [ask], will you take our PAC money?”
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“Bill Barr was a very well known source for the New York Times.”
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“There was a case in Florida where a Democrat Supervisor of Elections brought to the U.S. attorney a clear instance of fraud.”
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“A Soros aligned organization was fraudulently creating voter registrations so that they could request absentee ballots that were, that were…”
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“Bill Barr refused and said, I refuse to investigate any of this stuff because it will decrease confidence in the elections.”
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“I wish I would have had the chance to be Attorney General.”
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“I think Trump also believed that someone who had been unfairly accused of something and who had endured the grind of that would care about…”
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“I had one senator, you know, from Oklahoma really grill me about like my vote against the anti Semitism bill.”
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“I oftentimes couldn't get a meeting, you know, with people like Senator Murkowski and Senator Collins.”
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“I do think that, you know, the riskiest thing we've seen is what Obama got everybody together to do on December 9th of 2016 when he ordered…”
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“When the Biden FBI raided Trump's house, they engaged in a predicate criminal act.”
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“Obama on December 9 calls in Clapper, Brennan, Comey, and says, you guys have gotta go out and reignite this Russia thing.”
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“A real discussion in the 90s going on about extending NATO membership to Russia, which is what we should have done.”
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“We in Congress had people that were doing various ROLES within the D.C. police Department come and say, we want to be whistleblowers and we…”
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“Joseph Mifsud was this professor who was drawn into an intelligence operation against the United States. He was drawn into that operation…”
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“I believe that some of this crowd in the Obama administration knew that their direct management of an asset against the Trump administration…”
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“And so they went to other European countries and said, you do us a favor, we do you a favor, but the favor we want from you, you, is…”
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“A lot of the decisions that get made in Washington are detached from the elected leaders.”
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“Those decisions are made by staff, by interest groups, by foreign countries at times.”
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“I think Hakeem Jeffries becomes the speaker.”
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“Democrats believe or what they've recently been conditioned to believe is that shutdowns are good for them under Trump.”
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“My prediction is Democrats win the midterms, they execute a series of ransom, like shutdowns on Trump.”
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“I would vote for [Ron DeSantis] again for governor if he could run again for governor of Florida.”
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“Bernie's like a deeply selfish person. He's selfish and a coward.”
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“Bernie has won the argument on this shift towards socialism, but the party structurally did things twice to stop him from becoming the…”
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“AOC is a very different person today than when she got to Congress. You know, totally corrupted, co opted completely.”
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“I did not [take APAC money]. I refused those funds.”
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“No, but it is reflective of the performance art of Congress. And it was just bad performance art.”
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“I authored Florida's marijuana law. I support President Trump rescheduling marijuana.”
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“We are printing money to buy our own debt right now.”
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“The way housing is indexed to what people make and what they can afford is insane in this country.”
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“Oftentimes it's people's economic conditions that take the choice away.”
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“If you're sitting on $130,000 in student loans because you were told that you had this great [future].”
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“It's not marital bondage as much as it's economic bondage to debt.”
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“They can have power in business, they can have wealth, they can have money.”
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“Nature is sending us the message. When we see the declining birth rate, when we see the societal impact, nature is sending us the message…”
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“There are many who will watch this discussion and say, I am. That I am perfectly suited for marriage. I have everything I've done everything…”
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“Democrats believed that there is this vast part of the population whose dream candidate is some combination of Michelle Obama and Oprah.”
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“We're going to see automation in the next three years in a level that you and I have never seen in our lives.”
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“Automation in transportation, in agriculture, in manufacturing will be the new dominant force in our lives.”
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“You may see these Obamacare credits extended via a discharge petition.”
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