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- [00:00]
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- [01:00]
Will Sommer
Hey guys. Welcome back to the Bulwark. This is Will Sommer. I'm joined today by Joe Perticone. He's the author of our great Press Pass newsletter on Congress. Today we're going to talk about Tony Gonzalez, the scandal plagued Republican congressman who's now announced his retirement. Joe, what's going on?
- [01:17]
Joe Perticone
So Tony Gonzalez and this had been brewing for a while, the allegations that he had an affair with one of his own staffers, with a subordinate, which is another layer of, you know, unethical behavior. But then the staffer, she committed suicide. She set herself on fire, died. More text messages came out in which it was revealed that he was pressuring her and really pushing her to send illicit photos and really pursuing her aggressively. And he was refusing to bow out of his race. He was refusing to resign. And then he just came out and he said, I'm going to be not seeking re election. This was after his primary primary already advanced to a runoff. So now the other Republicans just going to walk away with it. But it also kind of shows how far gone things have gotten in politics because if you remember when Paul Ryan was speaker, like not that long ago, like 10 years ago, you had Trent Franks from Arizona who he was having trouble conceiving with his wife and therefore started inquiring and, and seeking surrogates within Capitol Hill. And he tried to pressure staffers allegedly to carry his child. And it wasn't just, you know, I want you to be a surrogate, allegedly. It was I want to do it the old fashioned way with you.
- [02:40]
Will Sommer
Yeah.
- [02:41]
Joe Perticone
And he was forced to resign and he resigned from Congress and This, there's been no pressure on Gonzalez to resign. There's been a few Republicans, rank and file Republicans, but Mike Johnson hasn't said, you need to resign. He hasn't told him, you need to get out of here, because he knows that the majority is thin. And he has made the calculation that he'd rather have a thin majority with scumbags in it than maybe have a more difficult time for the next few months and not have a horribly unethical scumbag in it. So now Gonzalez isn't seeking reelection. The whole thing's a mess. And, you know, we, we've seen him kind of finally come clean about the affair, though he went further into, you know, insulting a grieving widower of this woman who he had the affair with, which I think we have a clip of.
- [03:33]
Will Sommer
This is truly crazy stuff. I mean, he's trying to this was right after the primary. And so he's kind of trying seems like maybe he's trying to kind of clean things up ahead of this runoff. And it really goes off the rails.
- [03:43]
Joe Perticone
Share just this one thing. One of the things that was relayed was, you know, what was Ms. Santos's last words? And they tried to make it all dramatic in the police report. This is specifically from the police report. The female subject with burn injuries then stated her husband is gay and having an affair with her best friend. I wonder if that had something to do with her tragic passing.
- [04:03]
Will Sommer
So that looks like that's like kind of a typical, like, Congressman affair scandal cleanup. But what drove me crazy about this video was, and correct me if I'm wrong, Joe, it sort of seemed like at the moment he was definitely planning to run still in this runoff, that he then goes and says, and by the way, a lot of people are blaming me for this woman's suicide. But if you read the police report, it says she's upset about her husband who was estranged from her by, I think they were separated at this point. And she tells the cops in her essentially dying words, my husband is gay. As everyone look it up. It's in the police report. I found the police report. It didn't mention the gay thing. As far as I correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, my sense is that that is when Republicans, they were like, he couldn't even pull off this cleanup thing. He's got to go after the grieving husband.
- [04:45]
Joe Perticone
And to be fair, like, he doesn't really have to go right now, is what they're saying. They're just like, don't, don't Run for re election. And he puts, well, we'll get to this in a second, the guy who's taking his place. But he puts the, with the scandal, he puts the district at risk. It's about a Republican plus 7 district, which is a comfortable margin, but in a blue wave year that brings it down within the margin of error, which means it could go Democratic. So he being scandal plagued, running for reelection would seriously put the seat at risk, would put their very, very dim chances at a majority or holding onto it at risk. And so now they're going to take their gamble with this new guy, Brandon Herrera.
- [05:30]
Will Sommer
Well, you know, before we get to him and there's a lot to dive in there. I mean, so the timeline here is so he goes into the runoff at the primary on Tuesday, he's slightly behind Herrera. And do you think that he was still intending to run on, let's say, Wednesday? Like it sort of seems that only. Or like what, what happened between the point where he comes out and does this apology and then his resignation.
- [05:48]
Joe Perticone
So usually when somebody's being very defiant about whether or not they're gonna not run again, what's happening behind the scenes is either a pressure campaign, like you need to get out, and then they go, well so what? I can win anyway. And then they realize, oh no, I'm not in the very like comfortable district that I used to be in, so I'm going to need lots of money, money that I don't have and now because of the scandal, don't have the ability to fundraise on my own. And so that help that would come from the campaign committees like the nrcc, potentially there's a threat, we're not going to help you out and therefore we're going to not care about your district and we're going to dedicate our resources elsewhere. You see this all the time. And so those factors that pile up, or he might have reliable deep pocket donors who he typically relies on in each cycle, he could have been communicated to by them that they're not going to chip in because, you know, can't have a man of ill repute running with their money. Unless he's running for president, of course. And then like all of those factors and then he decides, I'm not going to win this thing, it's not worth it, I can leave intact, go back to doing whatever my previous career was, maybe can launch a podcast, who knows, like they all have all these options now and in, in very quick amount of time. It was about like a 24 hour period before, where he thought he was going full steam to the runoff, to all of a sudden saying, no, I'm done.
- [07:22]
Will Sommer
That makes a lot of sense, you know, once you hit the point where it's like, oh, geez, you know, I'm second place. I mean, just right before we go to Brandon Herrera, I mean, just to underline. I mean, this was a truly twisted scandal. I mean, right. Like you talking a little about the text messages that emerged.
- [07:35]
Joe Perticone
Yeah. Him pressuring her to send photos and things like that. Like, people being able to see the evidence. I believe it was the Daily Mail that got their hands on these text messages. Like, being able to see in real time. And at this point, like, he had not addressed it, he had not acknowledged it. And then, of course, you saw in his radio interview where he says, well, I look forward to the Ethics Committee taking this on. He could have said that at any point. He could have said, oh, I welcome an ethics investigation. He didn't do that. So he's doing it now. In which there's a finite time left on the congressional calendar. Ethics committees, investigations don't continue when someone's no longer in Congress. They move at a glacial pace. Everybody knows that. They also don't inflict punishments other than, like, a strongly worded letter of admonishment when things do happen. And so him saying now that he welcomes an ethics investigation, it might sound like he's owning up to something to, like, a person who doesn't understand the inner workings of Congress, but it really is just him being like, yeah, I'm going to be out the door soon, so it doesn't matter. Do whatever you want.
- [08:41]
Will Sommer
So this means that Brandon Herrera, the guy who slightly beat him in the primary, was headed to a runoff with him. He's going to win the Republican nomination. We'll see if he gets to Congress. I mean, tell me about him. What's his story? Is this guy. Does he have his own issues?
- [08:56]
Joe Perticone
He does. They're not.
- [08:58]
Will Sommer
Bit of a Hitler thing.
- [08:59]
Joe Perticone
Yeah.
- [09:00]
Will Sommer
Not.
- [09:00]
Joe Perticone
Not of the, like, staffer affair suicide angle that Gonzalez has. He looks crazily like comedian Matt Barry, so there's potential for SNL shenanigans there. So good for him.
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Will Sommer
What might people remember Matt Barry from
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Joe Perticone
what we do in the Shadows? I think someone summoned a breakfast burrito.
- [09:21]
Will Sommer
Garth Merengue's Dark Place.
- [09:22]
Joe Perticone
It's me, Dag. I'm in a dead end. I've been cornered by some Cut. I think I can take them. Yeah, he's on one of the great episodes of community for I Am a Grifter. And this is Grifting 101, which. A show which is very good, but, like, has a lot of parallels to Capitol Hill. I'll just say that that's a.
- [09:42]
Will Sommer
That's one to explore. Yes. So, so, so, yeah. So. So what's his background? He's a big gun guy, right?
- [09:48]
Joe Perticone
Yeah. And, you know, he had a very swift backing from some of the, like, freedom. The Freedom Caucuses, political action arm, which is, like, who they endorse and who they back. They jumped on it really quick. They said, we're backing Brandon Herrera. Get Gonzalez out of here. Because Gonzalez ideologically was just like a regular Republican in the House. He's not like a Freedom Caucus guy. And so they seized on that. And so he had that very, like, right wing backing. And to say that, like, the median Republican has shifted very much to the right in recent years, he's even way further to the right of that. And he collects books, which I think we.
- [10:28]
Will Sommer
We also have some great points. That's him.
- [10:33]
Joe Perticone
There's my copy at my house next to a bunch of the German stick grenades. I got the 1939 edition printed in English just because I thought it was wild that you couldn't buy it on Amazon, but you can buy the Communist Manifesto in Daskapital.
- [10:46]
Will Sommer
The book he's referring to there is Hitler's Mein Kampf. It strikes me, look, I'm not saying you can't have a copy of Mein Kampf. You can't be interested in World War II history, but at the point where you're, some might say, a shrine, you got your Hitler book, you've got your World War II Nazi grenades. It's not a great sign.
- [11:02]
Joe Perticone
That's just sort of like a weird thing to be bragging about. And it's just odd that, like, he would go do that. And it shows that there's probably a lot more racist skeletons in his closet.
- [11:14]
Will Sommer
You know, he's also a YouTuber, right? I mean, he's a popular YouTuber, I think under the name Mr. AK. A gun guy.
- [11:20]
Joe Perticone
Shotguns are based.
- [11:24]
Will Sommer
Speaking of the sort of the Hitler aspect of it, he. At one point there was an article in the Washington Post where he had, like, an old Nazi gun, and he called it a ghetto blaster. He said, there's the original ghetto blaster. The. The idea of, like, the Jewish ghetto. I guess overall, it's, It's. There's a lot of, like, kind of weird stuff going on in this guy's background too. So if you look at this Tony Gonzalez race and you think, you know, oh, we're, you know, there's no more scandal to come from this district. It kind of seems like that's not the case.
- [11:48]
Joe Perticone
Yeah, you're starting to see Democrats and the opposition research groups roll out the oppo book on him, which usually happens when somebody finally emerges as a nominee or a front runner in this case, where they pull out clips like this. You're gonna find out a lot more because, like, when there's little things like this, you're noticing immediately there's going to be a long history of very similar behavior that's probably a lot worse than the bad stuff we've already seen.
- [12:17]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of footage. I mean, look, this guy's been endorsed by the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse, who is helping him campaign ahead of the primary. So that is very much this kind of gun guy culture.
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Joe Perticone
Yeah.
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Will Sommer
So, Joe, what should we, you know, just wrap up here? What should we be looking for out of this race? I mean, are Democrats, you know, are Democrats kind of looking to take this seat?
- [12:35]
Joe Perticone
They have like so many target districts right now, and they have, they just added more on what they call their red to blue districts, which is like where they want to flip them. I guarantee that they're paying a lot more attention to this. And you can see it by like when they roll out an oppo book on a race, like if a Republican runs in like a Republican plus 30 district, where, where I grew up a Democrat plus 30 district, there's not a deep opposition research book on them because there's not a lot to be gained by dedicating those research resources to digging into that candidate because they're guaranteed to win. The fact that people are already digging into this random new person who's running in this race shows that like, there's, there's some money, there's some financial investment in trying to unseat him. So I'd expect Democrats to start taking a closer look at this, especially as look at a lot of other seats in Texas that they definitely want to flip.
- [13:28]
Will Sommer
All right, well, this has been kind of the end of these, perhaps the end of the scandal plagued political career of Tony Gonzalez. Joe, thank you for joining me. Joe has the Press Pass newsletter. Subscribe. Hit the subscribe button here. Thanks for joining us.
- [13:42]
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