The House almost unanimously voted to force the Justice Department to release the files of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with every House Republican, except one, supporting the measure.
Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie‘s (R-KY) bill passed the House Tuesday afternoon after Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) spoke on the floor, where he called the vote was a “political exercise” for Democrats.
“It pains me to say it, I wish that was not the truth, but it is,” Johnson said.
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), who has staunchly opposed the discharge petition that forced the vote, was the sole Republican to vote against the legislation. The majority of Republican support was up in the air until President Donald Trump gave the green light Sunday in a Truth Social posting claiming that “we have nothing to hide.” Despite his encouragement to vote for the legislation, both he and Johnson have leaned into this being a “distraction” from Democrats.
“I have been a principled ‘NO’ on this bill from the beginning,” Higgins said in a social media post after the vote. “What was wrong with the bill three months ago is still wrong today. 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. If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.”
Victims of Epstein sat in the chamber during the vote, spoke at a press conference, and encouraged members to support the legislation.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, brought to the floor through a discharge petition, would require the Justice Department to make all relevant files publicly available, with victim protections. A discharge petition is a method used to force leadership to schedule a vote on legislation if it reaches 218 signatures. The discharge petition received its 218th signature last week after the speaker swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), 50 days after her election.
Last week, White House officials began lobbying Republicans on the petition to remove their signatures before it hit the 218 threshold, but the move failed. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Nancy Mace (R-SC), and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) remained on the petition leading to the vote this week.
The bill now heads to the upper chamber, where it is unknown if Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) will schedule a vote on the legislation. Many Republicans have called for amendments to be made in the Senate to the bill, but should these changes pass, the bill would have to come back to the House. The Senate has previously voted on the issue, after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) forced a floor vote on the Epstein files using a procedural tactic. Schumer’s effort failed, with the Republican-led Senate voting 51-49 to table it.
REPUBLICANS GIVEN GREEN LIGHT TO VOTE FOR EPSTEIN LIST: ‘WE’RE DONE WITH WORDS’
Trump’s green light came after the White House, House GOP leadership, and the DOJ have sought to move past the Epstein files following public fallout from when the department announced after the July 4 weekend that it had no plans to make any further documents available and affirmed that Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges related to the sex trafficking of minors.
The House Oversight Committee has launched its own investigation into the Epstein files, releasing batches of documents from the Epstein estate and the DOJ, but Massie argued that the committee has not released one name of the possible “client list” many people want to see.
