President-elect Donald Trump, a friend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein who a jury last year found liable for sexual abuse, is determined to install as the nation’s top law enforcement a man who himself stands credibly accused of statutory rape — so much so that he’s willing to potentially go to war with his own party if it chooses "ethics" and "family values" over raw political power.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., resigned last week after Trump nominated him to serve as attorney general. Although Gaetz has little in the way of legal experience, he is a partisan firebrand who excelled in his job interview by speaking in the blunt language of retribution, one Trump advisor told The Bulwark, as opposed to his theories of law and how precisely he’d manage the Department of Justice and its more than 115,000 employees.

“Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘yeah, I’ll go over there and start cuttin’ f***in’ heads,’” the advisor recounted.

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To his critics, Gaetz is a repellent sex criminal: a man in his 40s who attended drug-fueled parties as an elected Republican and had sex with a 17-year-old girl at one of them, according to a woman who testified before the House Ethics Committee. Gaetz has denied the allegations and a federal investigation into him ended without criminal charges.

His supporters, meanwhile, are not so much defending Gaetz, the man, as much as they are seeking to bury the evidence of any wrongdoing and force through his nomination in a demonstration of raw political power. The ethics panel........

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