Rep. Matt Gaetz won his Republican primary Tuesday and will face Democrat Rebekah Jones in Florida's District 1 race in November.
Gaetz won the seat in 2016 in one of Florida's most conservative congressional districts in the Panhandle.
The 40-year-old is an ally of former President Donald Trump and is reportedly part of a federal investigation into a sex trafficking case. Gaetz has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing.
He was facing a challenge from Mark Lombardo, a former Marine and executive at FedEx who had blanketed the western Panhandle with attack ads centering around the investigation.
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In one commercial, Lombardo insinuated, without evidence, that Gaetz was an informant who ultimately gave the FBI evidence to execute a search warrant Aug. 8 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, NBC News reported.
Meanwhile Jones, a former Florida Department of Health employee who questioned the state’s COVID-19 data, won the Democratic primary for the seat Tuesday.
Jones had claimed she was fired by the department for exposing problems. The state said she was fired for insubordination after being reprimanded several times.
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A state inspector general’s report concluded Jones' allegations were unfounded, and in a 268-page report said they found no evidence of wrongdoing or retaliation by the department.
Jones is also facing criminal charges after authorities said she illegally accessed the Department of Health's computer system to send a message to 1,750 people and downloaded confidential data and saved it to her devices.
Jones, 33, was briefly knocked out of the race by a court ruling that had agreed with arguments from a rival for the nomination that Jones had not met a legal requirement of being a registered Democrat for 365 days before qualifying. An appellate court later reversed the decision.
