‘We Are In Pure George Orwell 1984 Land’: MSNBC Legal Analyst Reacts to Trump’s Nomination of Matt Gaetz as AG

MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann reacted to President-elect Donald Trump’s latest nomination by claiming America was entering “pure George Orwell 1984 land.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Trump announced he will nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) as his attorney general. Lawmakers and pundits reacted with shock as Gaetz currently faces an Ethics Committee investigation.

In 2019, the DOJ investigated Gaetz over allegations related to sex trafficking and obstruction of justice. The Florida lawmaker denied the accusations, and the DOJ declined to bring any charges against him in 2023 after concluding its probe.

During a panel discussion hosted by MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace, Weissmann claimed the public should not be surprised that Trump is nominating “unqualified” candidates because the president-elect “is clearly not tethered to facts or law”:

WALLACE: On Monday, he made the announcement that he would turn to recess appointments. It’s obvious that this trio of Fox News anchors, Matt Gaetz, whose biggest war in Washington is with Kevin McCarthy, and Tulsi Gabbard, was what the recess appointment was all about.

WEISSMANN: Yeah, I sort of had two reactions to this announcement, and one is very similar to yours, which is we have in the president-elect somebody who is clearly not tethered to facts or law. With respect to facts, we know he has said repeatedly that there was a fraud in the election — he won it. And we know that is not true. And he lost all of the cases. But one and that one was on a some technical issue. So, he is adhering to a world where facts and law don’t matter.

And so we shouldn’t be surprised that he is selected to nominate and yet to be confirmed somebody for the attorney general and somebody for the Department of National Intelligence that are not just unqualified, but have shown that they’re untethered to the facts and maybe also the law. So that shouldn’t be surprising. And the other is really this idea of that somehow Matt Gaetz is going to be the person who prevents and stops weaponization when he is the exhibit A to weaponization. I mean, we are in pure George Orwell 1984 land where they say black is white, and we’re supposed to believe it.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.