How the Justice Department came to investigate Rep. Matt Gaetz
The missive arrived at an Orlando-area preparatory school in October 2019, outlining a damaging allegation against a music teacher there.
The teacher, in the letters telling, had had an inappropriate sexual relationship with the purported student who had written it. And the writer claimed to offer proof: private Facebook messages in which the teacher, Brian Beute, told his alleged victim: Please remember to keep this a secret. I could go to jail.
Beute, who had recently announced his candidacy in the local tax collectors race, knew the allegation was a lie, as investigators quickly determined. But what he could not foresee is how the ploy to sabotage his run for local office would drag the seedy politics in Seminole County, Fla., into the national spotlight and put a U.S. congressman with close ties to former president Donald Trump in the crosshairs of a Justice Department investigation.
The allegations against Beute, federal investigators concluded, had been fabricated by his incumbent opponent, Joel Greenberg, in a bid to smear him. But when authorities arrested Greenberg and sifted through his electronic records and devices according to documents and people involved in the case they discovered a medley of other alleged wrongdoing, leading them to open an investigation of possible sex trafficking involving a far more high-profile Florida Republican: Rep. Matt Gaetz.
This account of how the Justice Departments investigation evolved from an examination of a local tax collectors alleged misdeeds to a sprawling probe of sex and corruption involving a prominent Trump ally is based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the investigation or otherwise tied to Gaetz or Greenberg, as well as police reports and other public records. Many of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter remains politically sensitive.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/matt-gaetz-investigation-origins/2021/04/15/28413d70-9bd8-11eb-b7a8-014b14aeb9e4_story.html