Weekly Review

­It was reported that the Justice Department is investigating Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, the chief opponent of a 2015 bill in the Florida state legislature that prohibited revenge porn, for violating federal sex-trafficking laws.^{1 2 3} Mobile payment receipts show that Gaetz and Joel Greenberg, the former tax collector for Seminole County, Florida, who was indicted on charges of, among more than 30 other things, sex trafficking and the embezzlement of over $400,000 of COVID-19 relief funds for a cryptocurrency-mining operation, had transferred money as payment for sex into the accounts of women they had allegedly recruited online; the DOJ is also investigating whether Gaetz, Greenberg, and other members of their social circle had sex with a minor.^{4 5 6 7} Gaetz, who grew up in the house that served as the set of the 1998 film The Truman Show, denied the allegations on Tucker Carlson Tonight, in which he also asserted that Carlson, his wife, and one of the women involved in the case once had dinner together and that David McGee, a former federal prosecutor, had attempted to extort Gaetz’s father for $25 million in order to locate Robert A. Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared in 2007 during an unauthorized CIA mission to Iran, as well as to secure a pardon for the younger Gaetz.^{8 9} “He threw Levinson and the entire Levinson family under the bus,” said Robert Kent, a former Air Force intelligence officer who, along with Stephen Alford, a real estate developer who was convicted of fraud, had asked Gaetz’s father for the money in order to search for Levinson, despite the fact that Levinson was officially declared dead by the Trump Administration last year; Kent claimed that he mentioned the federal investigation “not to extort” but because “he might be interested in doing something good.”¹⁰ Donald Trump, a former friend of the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, allegedly said the Gaetz scandal seemed “really bad.”^{11 12}

During the first week of Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, the head of the homicide division of the Minneapolis Police Department testified that Chauvin’s decision to press his knee onto George Floyd’s neck after handcuffing him was “totally unnecessary,” a firefighter and certified EMT who was walking past the scene testified that she was told by police officers not to administer aid or check Floyd’s pulse, and the lead prosecutor revealed that Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, rather than the eight minutes and forty-six seconds that was recorded.^{13 14} “It’s fair to say that you grew angrier and angrier,” Chauvin’s attorney asked one witness.¹⁵ In the United Kingdom, thousands protested against a proposed law that would give police officers greater power to curb demonstrations by imposing time and noise limits, and a man in South London was stabbed to death at a vigil for a man who was stabbed to death.^{16 17} The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners reported that since the coup in Myanmar began, security forces have killed 550 people, 46 of whom were children, and Burmese authorities announced 20 warrants for social media influencers, models, and other celebrities who have spoken out against the military junta.¹⁸ Following criticism by Western fashion brands and social media influencers over the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang, the Chinese province that produces a fifth of the world’s cotton, the Chinese company Tencent removed custom Burberry skins from its video game Honor of Kings.¹⁹

In Ohio, a 57-year-old manufacturing plant employee was arrested after she texted her sister that a man who had been fired the day before had returned with a gun, which was an April Fools’ Day joke.²⁰ Fifteen million Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines were ruined after a facility in Baltimore accidentally mixed them with ingredients for the AstraZeneca vaccine.²¹ It was reported that New York governor Andrew Cuomo negotiated a $4 million book advance while his aides were covering up COVID-19 death tolls in nursing homes, and that Hunter Biden’s memoir begins with his recollection of watching Matt Gaetz mockingly read an account of his drug abuse into the record of the House Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment trial of Donald Trump.^{22 23}—Jensen Davis