The House on 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 inside the GOP.
The measure — which remarkably received help from practically each Republican — now heads to the Senate, the place GOP leaders should shortly resolve if they’ll ship it to Trump’s desk. The president has stated he’ll signal the invoice if Congress passes it, after months of calling the problem a “Democratic hoax.”
In the tip, even Speaker Mike Johnson and his management staff backed the measure, regardless of spending the summer season and fall making an attempt to quash Washington’s obsession with the Epstein files, whereas insisting the invoice didn’t do sufficient to defend victims’ privateness. Johnson stated Tuesday he’s urging his Senate counterpart, Majority Leader John Thune, to add key protections if he does resolve to take up the measure.
“I’m going to vote to move this forward,” Johnson stated at a press convention forward of the vote, including that “all the Republicans want to go on record to show they’re for maximum transparency.”
It’s a outstanding turnaround for Trump and Republican leaders in Washington, who had unsuccessfully tried to halt the measure led by 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 stated 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 stated throughout a information convention on Capitol Hill, shortly including that they’re now “on our side today.”
Massie has been pilloried by Trump and his advisers in latest weeks, together with private assaults on his marriage and a marketing campaign to main him in his district.
Yet on Tuesday, Massie stated he welcomed Trump’s turnaround on the problem: “What he’s doing this week is strengthening his position by coming on board, and we’re glad to have him.”
Johnson and GOP leaders are hopeful that they will 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 latest 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 main 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 checklist had not been launched, Kash Patel steered it was being saved hidden “because of who’s on that list.” Attorney General Pam Bondi stated in February of this 12 months that the Epstein consumer checklist 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 shortly making a major rift between Trump and his MAGA base. Many of his supporters had 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 convey a invoice 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 called a discharge petition, that compelled Johnson to carry the invoice 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 stated.