Lawmakers on Capitol Hill Tuesday took the numerous step of ordering President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to publicly release all of its investigative files into the convicted intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein, after months of nasty infighting throughout the GOP.
Congress is sending the measure — which remarkably received help from all however one Republican throughout each the House and Senate — to Trump’s desk as soon as it’s formally transmitted between the chambers. Despite months of calling the difficulty a “Democratic hoax,” the president has mentioned he’ll signal the bill.
Trump will accomplish that “whenever it gets to the White House,” a senior White House official mentioned Tuesday night. (The president was already scheduled to host the Saudi crown prince for dinner on the White House Tuesday evening.)
The velocity with which the bill moved via each chambers of Congress on Tuesday marked a stark reversal from current months when Trump and GOP leaders labored furiously to quash it. But Trump finally determined to permit his celebration to again the measure as strain mounted inside his celebration.
In the top, even Speaker Mike Johnson and his management staff backed the measure, regardless of spending the summer time and fall attempting to quash Washington’s obsession with the Epstein files, whereas insisting the bill didn’t do sufficient to shield victims’ privateness. And within the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune didn’t stand in the best way of Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s request for “unanimous consent” to cross it, sending it instantly to Trump as soon as acquired from the House.
Johnson mentioned earlier Tuesday he was urging his Senate counterpart to add key protections for victims’ privateness, which might have slowed the bill, however Thune mentioned he was unlikely to amend the laws that got here out of the House practically unanimously. “I think, when a bill comes out of the House 427 to 1, and the President has said he’s going to sign it, I’m not sure that amending it … is in the cards,” he advised reporters.
Ultimately, Johnson mentioned, “all the Republicans want to go on record to show they’re for maximum transparency.”
It was a outstanding turnaround for Trump and Republican leaders in Washington, who had unsuccessfully tried to halt the measure led by a celebration agitator, Rep. Thomas Massie, and strongly backed by Democrats. But by this weekend, with a House vote looming, Trump and his staff feared an embarrassing defeat was coming and he agreed to relent — successfully permitting GOP lawmakers to vote for Massie’s measure.
“This is an overdue moment,” Massie mentioned Tuesday, hours forward of the vote.
“We’ve fought the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, the speaker of the House and the vice president to get this win,” the Kentucky Republican mentioned throughout a information convention on Capitol Hill, rapidly including that they’re now “on our side today.”
Massie has been pilloried by Trump and his advisers in current weeks, together with private assaults on his marriage and a marketing campaign to major him in his district.
Yet on Tuesday, Massie mentioned he welcomed Trump’s turnaround on the difficulty: “What he’s doing this week is strengthening his position by coming on board, and we’re glad to have him.”
While Johnson delivered a blistering critique of Democrats over the Epstein saga forward of the vote, the effort drew widespread help from Republicans.
“Let’s get accountability, let’s get answers and let’s get this over with,” GOP Rep. Kevin Kiley of California mentioned.
The Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, added of the vote: “We all support holding bad guys accountable, and we’re all going to vote for this resolution.”
The solely lawmaker to vote towards it, Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, mentioned he did so due to the best way the laws is written. “It abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America. As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people – witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc,” he wrote on X after casting his vote.
Now, Johnson and GOP leaders are hopeful that they’ll quickly flip the web page from the months-long Epstein saga inside their very own convention, which has led to bitter feuds — just like the one between Trump and his once-close ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene in current months has joined Massie in pushing for the release of the files, prompting Trump himself to name her a “traitor” and name for her to be ousted in a major race.
The House’s investigative committees have launched their very own inquiries into the Epstein matter.
It was Trump himself who had initially helped gin up the GOP’s curiosity within the authorities’s Epstein investigation. The president had repeatedly speculated publicly whether or not the late financier and intercourse offender had died in jail and promised on the marketing campaign path to declassify the files.
Trump’s hand-picked DOJ officers had, too, fueled the hypothesis. When requested by a conservative podcast host in 2023 why the so-called Epstein record had not been launched, Kash Patel prompt it was being saved hidden “because of who’s on that list.” Attorney General Pam Bondi mentioned in February of this yr that the Epstein shopper record was sitting on her desk.
But months into Trump’s second time period, the White House had launched no new details about that investigation. The Epstein problem was rapidly creating a serious rift between Trump and his MAGA base. Many of his supporters have been loudly complaining that the administration was failing to release what Trump as soon as promised he would: the entire set of presidency files on Epstein.
Soon after, Massie, alongside along with his Democratic accomplice, Rep. Ro Khanna, launched a rogue push to go across the speaker and produce a bill to the ground with out GOP leaders’ approval. A handful of different Republicans — all girls, together with Greene — signed on, too.
The White House resisted the effort, with private telephone calls to members who had backed the measure and public threats to Massie, Greene and others.
But they couldn’t block it fully. Just days earlier, Massie and Khanna secured the 218th signature on a procedural gambit, often known as a discharge petition, that compelled Johnson to carry the bill to the ground.
Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who supplied that remaining signature to advance the measure, insisted on Tuesday it was not only a Democrat or Republican push.
“This is a demand from the nation. This is not a partisan issue,” Grijalva mentioned.
This headline and story have been up to date with further particulars.