President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to become attorney general believes that an agent of the Israeli government was involved in an extortion attempt connected to his high-profile sex-trafficking investigation.

The most surprising part: There’s serious evidence that Matt Gaetz may be correct. The open question, though, is whether the agent was acting on behalf of the government of Israel itself.

The details of the case feel ripped from a Coen Brothers film, except that it now involves a man on the cusp of becoming the nation’s top federal law enforcement official.

In the fall of 2021, the U.S. government indicted a Florida developer named Stephen Alford for a $25 million extortion scheme targeting Gaetz’s father, Don Gaetz, while his son was under investigation on those sex trafficking charges.

The stated goal was to pressure Don Gaetz to fund a mission to free an American man named Robert Levinson, who had been imprisoned in Iran while allegedly on a mission for the CIA.

In exchange, the Air Force officer promised Don Gaetz that payment of the money would result in “a plan that can make [Gaetz’s] future legal and political problems go away.” The case also involved a former Department of Justice prosecutor and U.S. Air Force intelligence officer in a scheme dubbed “Project Homecoming.

Evidence of the extortion scheme is considerable, laid out in reports in the Washington Examiner, American Conservative, The Spectator, and other conservative outlets, as well as in a federal indictment.

” The day after the initial contact in mid-March 2021, Don Gaetz then says he met with the officer, who made the terms explicit in a letter: “In exchange for the funds being arranged, and upon the release of Mr. Levinson, the team that delivers Mr. Levinson to the President of The United States shall strongly advocate that President Biden issue a Presidential Pardon, or instruct the Department of Justice to terminate any and all investigations involving Congressman Gaetz.”