Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melbert, joining you on this December 23rd, a holiday week.

And we are following a lot of news. We have some fun stuff by the end of the hour.

But we are with you following the big news out of Washington tonight, the House Ethics Committee,

releasing something that many people at first thought might not see the light of day.

And it tells an interesting and important story about the

limits even of MAGA era secrecy. The bipartisan health ethics committee, which has plenty of

Republicans on it, releasing the report on a former Republican member of Congress, Matt Gates,

who still remains a big figure in the MAGA world. And there are a lot of important

pieces of evidence in here. There are conclusions. And remember, this is not coming from just one media

outlet or one set of interviews or sources, but a more exhaustive report overseen by investigators

and members of both parties. So this House committee says that Matt Gates, who remember was the

big Republican fire brand that Donald Trump selected as his first goal to be attorney general,

later withdrawn over the past month, this individual Gates regularly, quote, paid women for

engaging in sexual activity with him, and that he, quote, engaged in sexual activity with him and that he quote engaged in sexual activity

with a minor with a quote 17 year old girl you see that up on the screen that refers to an

incident that the committee says it was able to corroborate in 2017 the committee states had found

that gates violated florida's statutory rape law. Now, as a criminal

matter, that would be something dealt with by federal prosecutors if it had a federal nexus,

or the state and local prosecutors who deal with state statutory laws. So this is not a finding

that a prosecution is imminent,

but it is a finding by this committee, which includes many Republicans about the very serious

state crime there, statutory rape. The report states that Gates used or possessed illegal drugs,

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