Someone accessed files said to contain damaging info about Trump AG-nominee Gaetz, lawyer says

WASHINGTON — An unauthorized person gained access to a file containing confidential testimony from women who have made allegations about former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump's pick to become the next attorney general, a lawyer said Tuesday.

Attorneys involved in a civil case brought by a Gaetz associate were notified this week that an unauthorized person accessed a file shared between lawyers that included unredacted depositions from a woman who has said Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17, and a second woman who says she saw the encounter, according to attorney Joel Leppard.

Gaetz has denied all the allegations, and the Justice Department ended its sex trafficking investigation without any criminal charges against him. A lawyer who has represented Gaetz said he would not answer any questions when reached Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The apparent breach comes as Gaetz is facing intense scrutiny over the allegations threatening to complicate his path to be confirmed as the nation's top federal law enforcement officer.

Several Republicans in the Senate have expressed concern about his nomination or refused to say publicly yet whether they will support him. Gaetz has been calling senators and is expected to start meeting with some of them as soon as this week. But senators are divided over to whether demand access to a report by the House Ethics Committee, which was investigating the Florida Republican until his resignation from the Congress last week.

The files the person was able to access were part of a defamation case filed by a Gaetz associate against Gaetz's onetime political ally Joel Greenberg, who pleaded guilty in 2021 to sex trafficking of a minor, and admitted that he had paid at least one underage girl to have sex with him and other men.

The email notifying the lawyers about the apparent hack says a person named ''Altam Beezley'' downloaded the files, and when an attorney emailed the person to ask them to identify themselves, the email was returned because the email address was not found. The apparent breach was first reported Tuesday by The New York Times.

One of the women testified she saw him having sex with a 17-year-old at a party in Florida in 2017, according to Leppard. Leppard has said that his client testified she didn't think Gaetz knew the girl was underage, stopped their relationship when he found out and did not resume it until after she turned 18. The age of consent in Florida is 18.

A Trump transition spokesperson said Tuesday that they are ''baseless allegations intended to derail the second Trump administration," adding that the Justice Department ''investigated Gaetz for years and cleared him of wrongdoing.''

Trump's pick of Gaetz has roiled many career Justice Department lawyers, who privately have expressed concern about having him lead the same agency that investigated the sex trafficking allegations involving underage girls. Trump, who has railed against the Justice Department over the two criminal cases brought against him, has described Gaetz as the right person to ''root out the systemic corruption'' within the agency.

The House Ethics Committee began its review of Gaetz in April 2021, deferred its work in response to a Justice Department request, and renewed its work shortly after Gaetz announced that the Justice Department had ended its sex trafficking investigation. The committee's investigation effectively ended last week when Gaetz resigned from Congress shortly after Trump named him the nominee for attorney general.

Over the summer, the committee provided an unusual public update into its long-running investigation, saying its review now includes whether Gaetz engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct.

Greenberg, a fellow Republican who served as the tax collector in Florida's Seminole County, admitted as part of a plea deal with prosecutors in 2021 that he paid women and an underage girl to have sex with him and other men. The men were not identified in court documents when he pleaded guilty. Greenberg was sentenced in late 2022 to 11 years in prison.

Federal investigators scrutinized a trip that Gaetz took to the Bahamas, with a group of women and a doctor who donated to his campaign, and whether the women were paid or received gifts to have sex with the men, according to people familiar with the matter who were not allowed to publicly discuss the investigation.