ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - Matt Gaetz is no longer President-elect Donald Trump's pick for U.S. attorney general, with Gaetz announcing Thursday he was withdrawing his name from consideration.
Gaetz's withdrawal came less than an hour after he was contacted by CNN for comment after CNN reported a woman told the ethics panel that she had had two sexual encounters with Gaetz in 2017, when she was 17-years-old at the time.
Pam Bondi, who served as Florida's attorney general from 2011-2019, has now been tabbed as Trump's pick for attorney general.
KMOX Political Analysts John Hancock and Michael Kelley, hosts of 'Hancock and Kelley' gave their reactions Friday to Gaetz withdrawing his name as Trump's pick as Attorney General.
"He was going to be a distraction, he wasn't going to get confirmed," said Kelley, a longtime Democratic strategist on 'Total Information A.M.' "Too many Republicans had said they would not vote for him in the Senate. So he moved on."
"I wondered if it was a kind of flare by the administration sent up to have everybody focus on that 'shiny object' because there are some other controversial picks here (Robert Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth). I think as long as Gaetz was there, he was 'shiny object' that everybody was focusing on. Now the Republican senators are going to have to decide how hard they will swallow for this president as it relates to Gabbard and Hegseth."
Hancock, the former chair for the Missouri Republican Party gave his thoughts on Gaetz.
"I sort of think it was an orchestrated deal to keep the ethics report from coming out, resigning from Congress and now you got that precedent to lean on not to release and the plan all along was for him not to carry on with the nomination," said Hancock. "I think he's going to run for Florida governor in two years. That's kind of what I think the politics of it is, but we don't know."