“The View” co-host Meghan McCain called on Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to resign following allegations that he had sex with an underage girl and compared his scandal to one involving a Democratic member of Congress and a Chinese spy.
“Look, there have always been weird rumors about Matt Gaetz on Capitol Hill,” McCain said on “The View” on Monday. “I’m not surprised by this. I’m actually not … I will say, he should certainly resign. The same way I think [New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo should resign.”
McCain then referenced Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), whose involvement with a female Chinese spy was called into question late last year. McCain said Swalwell should be removed from the House Intelligence Committee, an argument that has also been made by a number of House Republicans.
Gaetz has denied he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and in a new op-ed this week suggested the allegations against him are part of a smear campaign by political opponents, making reference to McCain’s late father, the senator from Arizona.
“Just as they once falsely attacked President Donald Trump as a Russian asset, Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, and even John McCain as having fathered a child out of wedlock, they now attack me,” Gaetz wrote. “Of course, none of what they say ever amounts to anything, yet it is endlessly repeated by leftist television anchors such as Chris Cuomo, who uses his platform to cover for his brother’s appalling subjection of nursing home patients to death by the coronavirus. They think themselves such wonderful arbiters of moral purpose.”
McCain said a growing trend of salacious stories about “men and sex” in politics makes her angry and amounts to “a violation for all women, no matter the context.”
Gaetz has also been accused of showing fellow members pictures of naked women on his phone while on the House floor, something McCain called “particularly disgusting.”
“And for whatever journalists are reporting that, please tell me the men that saw that and thought it was both hilarious and appropriate,” she said, before offering a prediction for what might happen next in the Gaetz scandal.
“The most likely scenario is that Matt Gaetz slept with a 17-year-old and sex trafficked her and he’s probably gonna go to jail,” McCain said. “There’s also this really weird group of people who always hung out at Mar-a-Lago in the Trump years and clearly Matt Gaetz and his teenage girlfriends were allegedly those people as well.”