Florida congressman invites Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, says Epstein’s lawyer is defending him

In what might be the most on-brand Republican thing we’ve ever seen on Twitter, last night Florida congressman Matt Gaetz actually defended his decision to hang out with an accused white nationalist and Holocaust denier by basically saying “Hey, the guy who defended Jeffrey Epstein says he’s cool.”

In 2018, Gaetz brought far-right troll and known Holocaust denier Charles “Chuck” Johnson to the State of the Union, and last night he defended this boneheaded move by producing what essentially amounts to a character witness email from controversial lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who you may remember as the guy who secured an incredibly lenient sentence for accused child sex predator and convicted human trafficker Jeffery Epstein.

While arguing with a Democratic strategist on Twitter Monday, Gaetz decided to share a screengrab of an email he says was written by Dershowitz, that says Johnson just said all that anti-Semitic stuff to “test censorship.”

“I’ve known Charles Johnson since he was a high school student who worked for me,” said Dershowitz in his email to Gaetz. “He is certainly not an antiSemite or a Holocaust denier. He is a provocateur who sometimes does foolish things to make a point. He has apologized for his insensitive misuse of the Holocaust to test censorship and has promised never again to do anything like that. I take him at his word. Alan Dershowitz. Sent from iPhone.”

Despite the tweet getting ratio’d into oblivion, Gaetz later told Politico that he chose to share this email because Dershowitz is someone who “has a perspective,” or something or other. “He had a perspective he shared with me that I shared in response to being attacked in a profane tirade from a jilted former Hillary Clinton operative,” said Gaetz. “As Politico reported in the past, I’m not defending CHARLES Johnson. I didn’t even know who he was when a fellow member asked me to give him an unused ticket.”

Of course, the timing of this particular Gaetz tweet could not have been worse.

Yesterday, The New Yorker ran a staggeringly revolting profile of Dershowitz, where it’s revealed, among other things, that the lawyer would always find a way to bring up the topic of rape in his Harvard law school classes and believes that the age of consent should be lowered to 15 years old.

It might seem odd for any elected official to call on Epstein’s former lawyer to defend hanging out with a Holocaust denier, but this is Matt Gaetz — the same guy who just a couple weeks ago blamed Al Gore and “the internet” for producing so many stories about Trump’s connections to Epstein.

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This article appears in Jul 24-30, 2019.