WASHINGTON — House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday he will “strongly urge” the House Ethics Committee not to release the results of its investigation into former Rep. Matt Gaetz, rebuffing senators seeking access now that Gaetz is President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general.

Johnson’s intervention is highly unusual because the ethics panel has traditionally operated independently. His move is sure to add to the growing furore on Capitol Hill over Gaetz’s nomination to become the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

“I’m going to strongly urge the Ethics Committee not to issue the report, because that’s not how we do things in the House,” Johnson told reporters at the US Capitol. “And I think that would be a terrible precedent for the set.”

Ethics reports have previously been published following a member’s resignation, although this is extremely rare.

Johnson’s comments were a reversal from Wednesday, when he suggested a hands-off approach to the Gaetz report. “The Speaker of the House is not involved in this and cannot be involved in this,” he previously said of the Ethics Committee.

The bipartisan Ethics Commission is under enormous pressure as it weighs what to do about its years-long investigation into sexual misconduct and other allegations against Gaetz, who resigned from Congress on Wednesday after Trump announced him as his nominee in the position of general prosecutor.

It is standard practice for the Ethics Committee to end investigations when members of Congress leave on the grounds that they lack the authority to continue. But the circumstances with Gaetz are not standard given his potential role in Trump’s Cabinet. Senators say the committee’s material needs to see the light of day so it can fully vet his nomination.

“The sequence and timing of Mr. Gaetz’s resignation from the House raises serious questions about the content of the House Ethics Committee’s report,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Thursday. “We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to be withheld from the American people.”

Gaetz has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and said last year that a separate Justice Department investigation into sex-trafficking allegations involving underage girls had ended without federal charges.

“The rules of the House have always been that a former member is beyond the jurisdiction of the ethics committee,” Johnson added. “And so I don’t think it’s relevant.”

But Republican and Democratic senators alike on the Judiciary Committee that will consider Gaetz’s attorney general nomination have demanded that the report be made available to them.

“I think it will be material in the proceedings,” said Sen. Thomas Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said, “I believe there should be no limitation on the investigation of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including anything that the House Ethics Committee has generated.”

However, the chairman of the ethics committee, Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss., says he does not know if the committee could provide the report to the Senate: “That is something that staff is looking at and trying to provide some guidance for members.”

When asked if he would at least discuss the report with upper house members, Guest said “that’s a decision the committee as a whole will make at some point.”

Trump’s attorney general is expected to oversee sweeping changes to the Justice Department, which has been the target of Trump’s ire over two criminal cases he brought accusing it of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and collected classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump, who has seen himself as the victim of politically motivated criminal prosecutions, repeatedly vowed during the campaign to exact revenge on his political enemies if returned to the White House.

In a statement Wednesday announcing his election, Trump said Gaetz would remove “systemic corruption” from the Justice Department and return the department “to its true mission of fighting crime and upholding our democracy and the constitution”.

The federal sex-trafficking investigation into Gaetz began under Attorney General Bill Barr during Trump’s first term and focused on allegations that Gaetz and former political ally Joel Greenberg paid underage girls and escorts or gave them gifts in exchange sex.

Greenberg, a fellow Republican who served as tax collector in Florida’s Seminole County, admitted as part of a plea deal with prosecutors in 2021 that he paid women and a minor girl to have sex with him and other men. The men were not identified in court documents when he pleaded guilty. Greenberg was sentenced in late 2022 to 11 years in prison.