Donald Trump ruffled more than a few feathers on Capitol Hill when he announced Wednesday he’d called on Matt Gaetz to be his next Attorney General.

Gaetz, 42, is among the most controversial lawmakers in Congress, having been accused of a number of controversies; including showing photos of naked women on the House floor and an investigation into potential sex trafficking.

Before the Floridian can join Trump’s cabinet as the nation’s top law enforcement official, he’ll have to endure a Senate confirmation hearing that’s sure to see him questioned on his laundry list of scandals.

Lone ‘no’ vote on anti-human trafficking bill

Back in 2017, the freshman congressman Gaetz wasn’t a national name yet. Still, he turned heads across the country after he was the lone “no” vote on an anti-human trafficking bill that easily passed both the House and Senate.

Gaetz explained—from a Facebook Live in his living room—that he voted no because he felt the bill, the Combating Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act, would represent “mission creep” at the federal level. In layman’s terms, he felt the bill would lead to more government bureaucracy than was needed, though he agreed with the bill’s goal. Gaetz was still slammed for being the lone opposing vote, however, and his “no” vote resurfaced years later during the fallout of his alleged sex trafficking probe.

Bringing right-wing troll to SOTU

Gaetz was again the subject of eye-rolls across the nation in 2018 when he brought the far-right internet troll Chuck Johnson to the State of the Union address. Making the guest choice all-the-more baffling was that some of Gaetz’ colleagues from Florida had opted to bring survivors of a devastating hurricane and the family of a hostage in Iran.

Gaetz, meanwhile, found it appropriate to bring Johnson; a man who’d been banned from Twitter, accused of white nationalism and Holocaust denying, and who was perhaps best known for proliferating fake news stories. Gaetz told the Daily Beast at the time that he gave Johnson a ticket simply because he showed up at his office on the day of the speech. Johnson, meanwhile, said he was a fan of Gaetz because he he has “that f–k you mindset.”

‘Witness intimidation’ of Michael Cohen

Gaetz had turned himself into a national firebrand by 2019, acting as a staunch defender of Donald Trump who frequently appeared on Fox News. It was this year that Gaetz—one day before Michael Cohen was slated to speak before the House Oversight Committee—accused Trump’s former-fixer-turned-foe of being unfaithful to his wife, in what came off as a veiled threat.

Gaetz, tagging Cohen’s account on Twitter, wrote: “Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”

The post was deleted after Gaetz was admonished for ever making the post. Gaetz insisted it wasn’t “witness intimidation” but was instead just “witness testing.” The Florida Bar opened a probe into Gaetz but ultimately cleared him.

Nestor, the hidden Cuban ‘son,’ emerges

In the summer of 2020, Gaetz got into a fiery altercation with the former Rep. Cedric Richmond during a congressional hearing on police reform. During a heated back-and-forth, Gaetz exploded at Richmond for suggesting he didn’t know what it was like to fear for a Black son.

Gaetz was unmarried and—as far as the public knew—childless at the time, so many were left scratching their heads after his exchange with Richmond. That same day, however, the Florida congressman took to Twitter to post a photo of who he described was “my son Nestor,” was a 19-year-old from Cuba who’d apparently lived with him for six years. “We share no blood but he is my life,” Gaetz said. He also emphasized in his post that Nestor came to Florida “legally.”

Gaetz and Nestor’s relationship has since been scrutinized, however. Nestor is the son of Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend and spent time living with both Gaetz and his blood family in Florida. Gaetz was also discovered to have described Nestor in social media posts as a “local student” in 2016 and as “my helper” in 2017.

Sex trafficking probe

The New York Times published a bombshell report in 2021 that claimed Gaetz was being investigated by the Department of Justice for sex trafficking. Among the allegations against Gaetz was that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her to travel across state lines. “It is verifiably false that I have traveled with a 17-year-old woman,” he told the publication at the time.

In the end, the DOJ announced last year that no charges would be filed against Gaetz and that its probe was complete. However, his pal, the Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, pleaded guilty to a slew of sex crimes and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. In 2021, the Daily Beast reported on a confession letter that was penned by Greenberg in which he claimed that Gaetz had paid him to arrange sex with several women and a girl who was 17. The Beast also revealed private Venmo logs that showed Gaetz sent money to Greenberg, even using a nickname for the adolescent.

While Gaetz has been absolved legally, the scandal hurt his reputation on the hill and has seemingly led to unsavory stories about the lawmaker. Recently, that included court docs emerging in September that alleged Gaetz was at a party in 2017 with a naked high school junior who was there to “engage in sexual activities” while drugs like cocaine and ecstasy were present.

Naked pics on the House floor

A CNN report alleged in 2021 that Gaetz had proudly showed images and clips of naked women he’d been sleeping with to aides and lawmakers while in the U.S. Capitol and on the House floor. Among the alleged videos shown on Gaetz’ phone was a nude woman with a hula hoop. A source told CNN the seedy clips were a “point of pride” for the congressman.

CNN’s report suggested that the allegedly sordid conduct from Gaetz was part of a trend from the congressman. The network reported that staff who worked for former House Speaker Paul Ryan once had to meet with Gaetz during his first term to lecture him about behaving professionally on the House floor.

Gaetz denied CNN’s report “in the strongest possible terms.” Just before the story broke, Gaetz claimed that he and his family had been “victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25 million while threatening to smear my name.”

Can you spare a pardon?

While perhaps his least-controversial scandal, Gaetz was thoroughly grilled in 2022 when testimony from a Trump attorney—emerging as part of a Jan. 6 Committee hearing—revealed that the lawmaker had allegedly asked for a sweeping pardon from Trump during his final days in office.

That attorney, Eri Herschmann, said in a deposition that Gaetz had requested a presidential pardon “from the beginning of time up until today, for any and all things.” Cassidy Hutchinson, an ex-White House adviser, also testified that Gaetz had been seeking a pardon since “early December” in 2020, but she said she was unsure why.

After the deposition clip emerged, Gaetz dismissed the committee as a “political sideshow” while other lawmakers, like the former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, remarked that the request was proof Gaetz was up to no good. “The only reason you ask for a pardon is if you think you’ve committed a crime,” Kinzinger said.

House Ethics Committee probe emerges

Likely the most pressing scandal to Gaetz today is a House Ethics Committee probe that was opened last year. The probe, which was initially opened in 2021 but put on ice, is investigating Gaetz for sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, misuse of state identification records, and bribery.

Gaetz denied wrongdoing when the probe was announced in 2023 and said it was “not something I’m worried about.” He also suggested he was being targeted over his politics, saying, “It’s also funny that the one guy who doesn’t take the corrupt lobbyist and PAC money seems to be under the most Ethics investigations.”

The probe remained open as of Wednesday however by Wednesday evening, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Gaetz will resign from Congress “effective immediately” following his nomination to serve as attorney general by President-elect Trump, effectively killing it.

When news broke of Gaetz’ appointment, ABC News reported that there was an “audible gasp” in a room of House Republicans who were meeting behind closed doors.

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US inflation rose to 2.6 per cent in October, as the Federal Reserve debates whether to cut interest rates at its last meeting before US president-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Wednesday’s figure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was in line with economists’ expectations of a 2.6 per cent rate of growth and above September’s 2.4 per cent.

Once volatile food and energy prices were stripped out, “core” CPI held steady at 3.3 per cent on an annual basis. However, monthly core prices rose 0.3 per cent for a third month in a row, indicating that underlying inflation had yet to be fully tamed.

Alberto Musalem, president of the St Louis Fed, warned in a speech on Wednesday that the risk that inflation stalled out above 2 per cent or moved higher had risen, while the risk that the labour market deteriorates quickly had “possibly fallen”.

He reiterated his call for “gradual” reductions in interest rates.

Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo, said Wednesday’s figures showed that “it’s difficult to wring out this last bit of inflation”, pointing to the “long tail” of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the persistence of price pressures in services.

The inflation data will be closely watched by the US central bank, which has already lowered its benchmark rate by 0.75 percentage points over two successive meetings to a new target range of 4.5-4.75 per cent.

Fed officials are trying to reach a “neutral” rate setting that keeps inflation in check without squashing demand, in a bid to pull off a so-called soft landing that would avoid a recession.

In the wake of Trump’s election, markets have been worried about a resurgence of inflation, driving up Treasury yields. They fell back slightly following Wednesday’s data release, as investors bet that the Fed was now more likely to cut interest rates next month.

Futures markets imply a roughly 80 per cent probability of a quarter-point cut in December, up from 60 per cent before the inflation figures.

Two-year Treasury yields, which track interest rate expectations, fell 0.07 percentage points to 4.27 per cent.

“I think we’re seeing some relief that [the inflation data] wasn’t an upside surprise and relief that it was just in line with expectations,” said House.

US stocks rose slightly, with the S&P 500 up 0.3 per cent in afternoon trading.

Most metrics suggest the US economy is in good health, with recent retail sales figures suggesting consumers are still spending. The labour market is also robust despite last month’s poor jobs report, which was dragged down by hurricanes and a strike at Boeing.

Inflation has fallen significantly from its peak of more than 9 per cent in 2022, but progress has slowed in recent months.

On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.3 per cent — in line with the past three reports. Half of that increase stemmed from a 0.4 per cent increase in the index tracking housing-related costs, the BLS said on Wednesday.

Energy prices were flat for the month, following a 1.9 per cent decline in September. Further increases in airline fares were offset by declines in prices for clothes and furniture.

At a press conference last week, following the Fed’s latest quarter-point rate cut, chair Jay Powell said he expected inflation to “come down on a bumpy path over the next couple of years” before settling near the central bank’s 2 per cent target.

Neel Kashkari, Minneapolis Fed president, told Bloomberg on Wednesday that he was confident “inflation is headed [in] the right direction”.

But the path could become more volatile following Trump’s victory. The president-elect has pledged to enact sweeping tariffs, deport immigrants en masse and lower taxes. Economists warn that these policies could stoke price pressures while breeding uncertainty that could hamper growth.

Mark McCormick, head of forex and emerging markets strategy at TD Securities, said a second Trump presidency, combined with relatively strong recent economic data, made one “cautious to think that inflation can get back to 2 per cent at a comfortable rate any time soon”.

Powell last week said the Fed did not “speculate” about the timing or substance of any future policy changes. As such, he said, “in the near term, the election will have no effects on our policy decisions”.

Is intelligent alien life darting around in space — and even in the skies above us here on Earth? Has the U.S. government been covering up unexplained phenomena, and using secret extraterrestrial discoveries to boost its own technology?

Those are among the questions members of Congress are discussing on Wednesday in a joint hearing by subcommittees of the House Oversight Committee. Its title: “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.”

Four experts are slated to testify in the public hearing, which began at 11:30 a.m. ET. You can watch the proceeding live.

The Pentagon issued a report in March saying that it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Extraordinary moments unfolded in a similar hearing last year, most notably when retired Maj. David Grusch, formerly part of the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force, alleged that the U.S. government has recovered nonhuman “biologics” from crash sites and has long operated a secret reverse-engineering program to glean advances from recovered vessels.

Grusch isn’t among the witnesses for the 2024 hearing. Instead, those testifying include:

Tim Gallaudet, retired rear admiral, U.S. Navy; CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, LLC

“Confirmation that UAPs are interacting with humanity came for me in January 2015,” Gallaudet said in his written testimony.

He describes being part of a pre-deployment naval exercise off the U.S. East Coast that culminated in the famous “Go Fast” video, in which a Navy F/A-18 jet’s sensors recorded “an unidentified object exhibiting flight and structural characteristics unlike anything in our arsenal.”

He was among a group of commanders involved in the exercise who received an email containing the video, which was sent by the operations officer of Fleet Forces Command, Gallaudet said.

“The very next day, the email disappeared from my account and those of the other recipients without explanation,” he said.

Luis Elizondo, author and former Department of Defense official

Elizondo’s testimony is brief and sure to raise scrutiny, alleging that a secretive arms race is playing out on the global stage.

“Let me be clear: UAP are real,” he writes. “Advanced technologies not made by our Government — or any other government — are monitoring sensitive military installations around the globe. Furthermore, the U.S. is in possession of UAP technologies, as are some of our adversaries.”

Elizondo is a former intelligence officer who later “managed a highly sensitive Special Access Program on behalf of the White House and the National Security Council,” according to his official bio.

“By 2012, [Elizondo] was the senior ranking person of the DOD’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a secretive Pentagon unit that studied unidentified anomalous phenomena,” his bio states, adding that he resigned in 2017.

Michael Gold, former NASA associate administrator of space policy and partnerships; member of NASA UAP Independent Study Team

Gold’s testimony stresses the need for government agencies and academics to “overcome the pernicious stigma that continues to impede scientific dialogue and open discussions” about unexplained phenomena.

“As the saying goes, the truth is out there,” Gold said, “we just need to be bold enough and brave enough to face it.”

Michael Shellenberger, founder of Public, a news outlet on the Substack platform

Shellenberger’s testimony runs to some 214 pages, including a lengthy timeline of UAP reports from 1947 to 2023.

Shellenberger presses the White House and Congress to act, calling for the adoption of UAP transparency legislation and cutting funds for any related programs that aren’t disclosed to lawmakers.

“UAP transparency is bi-partisan and critical to our national security,” his written testimony states.

Reports of UFOs and UAPs are now more centralized

In 1977, President Carter asked NASA to look into resuming UFO investigations, but the agency and the Air Force believed “nothing would be gained by further investigation.”

But in recent years, there have been increased efforts to compile and centralize the reporting of unexplained phenomena.

In July 2022, the U.S. government established the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, to standardize reporting methods and data collection. It collects UAP reports from the military and from the Federal Aviation Administration including sightings reported by civilian pilots to air traffic control. The agency doesn’t offer a way for the general public to file a UAP report. It does accept “reports from current or former U.S. Government employees, service members, or contractor personnel with direct knowledge of U.S. Government programs or activities related to UAP dating back to 1945.”

The agency adds that potential filers should not submit “any information that is potentially CLASSIFIED, or unclassified information that is not publicly releasable (e.g. subject to export control regulations).”

Many historical records are also available

Because of intense public interest, a number of records related to UFO studies are available online, including a “case files” folder related to UAPs on the U.S. Navy’s website. The FBI also has an online “vault” of records, covering the period from 1947 to 1954.

As for the famous Project Blue Book run by the U.S. Air Force from 1947 through 1969, documents related to the project are now kept by the National Archives, which holds 37 cubic feet of case files, along with at least 5 other cubic feet of records.

The bulk of the Blue Book investigations into 12,618 reported sightings were resolved, or explained, — but 701 remained “Unidentified,” the Air Force has said. The service said that none of the incidents constituted a security threat or indicated abilities beyond modern science. It added, “There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’ were extraterrestrial vehicles.”