CNN’s Scott Jennings said Thursday that former Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s nomination as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general was a “bridge too far” due to his “fraught relationships” with lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
The former Florida lawmaker announced Thursday that he would be withdrawing his name from Trump’s cabinet picks, just over a week after his nomination. On “CNN News Central,” Jennings stated that while he believes Trump’s other cabinet picks could all be confirmed, he noted that the next nominee for attorney general should be someone without a problematic history.
READ: Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz Withdraws From Attorney General Consideration
“I think the rest of them all could be confirmed. Gatez, I think as I said to you that day, he always struck me as being in a different category. I think everybody else is still within the realm of confirmable. So this job, my advice would be, ‘Well, let’s find somebody who starts above water, not below water,’” Jennings said.
CNN co-host Boris Sanchez went on to highlight how Trump reportedly does not have a “backup attorney general in mind,” asking Jennings why the former president would go through the backlash for Gaetz if there had been concerns about his conduct “for years.”
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“I don’t know. I mean, that’s a great question. This may have been a decision that was made more on the fly than after a considered vetting process. That’s another thing about nominating people to jobs. It does pay to do your homework on the folks you send up,” Jennings continued.
“Look, everybody has things that come out about them. I mean, every nominee gets picked at and picked over. It doesn’t necessarily mean everything is fatal,” Jennings added. “But in this case, the information that had come out and that’s coming out today, obviously, was going to be a bridge too far for someone who already had pretty fraught relationships on the Hill.”
READ: Victor Davis Hanson Says Matt Gaetz Of Florida Could Be Trump’s ‘Sacrificial Lamb’ Pick
Since Gaetz’s nomination, the lawmaker has faced major backlash from corporate media, with reports indicating that the former Florida representative may not have had the support he needed from Republican senators, according to NBC News. On Wednesday, prior to the House Ethics Committee’s decision not to release its report related to Gaetz’s February 2023 sex trafficking investigation, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats requested files from the FBI, despite the Department of Justice having previously declined to pursue a case against Gaetz.
In his statement posted on X, Gaetz said he would remain “fully committed to seeing that Donald J. Trump is the most successful president in history.” Trump has since responded to Gaetz’s withdrawal announcement, noting that while Gaetz was “doing very well,” the lawmaker didn’t “want to be a distraction for the administration.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.