The decision not to prosecute Gaetz is legally defensible, at least judging by the former prosecutors willing to defend it and congressional investigators’ admission that the evidence they managed to obtain — without much help from the Department of Justice — would likely not be enough to convict Gaetz, at least on a charge of sex trafficking a child. But it’s also true that Gaetz could have been charged, too: Greenberg was, after all, and Gaetz likewise could be argued to have acted “in reckless disregard of the fact” that the girl with whom he was engaging in a “commercial sex act” could have been a minor.

“They know he paid me to pay the girls and that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage,” Greenberg wrote in December 2020, The Daily Beast reported