The House is poised to vote this week to force the Justice Department to release files on disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
It marks a rare and notable instance of the Republican-controlled Congress rebuking the Trump administration — and of President Donald Trump bending to congressional will — on an issue that has transcended party lines and rocked Trump’s second term.
After months of trying to halt momentum on the Epstein issue, including unsuccessfully pressuring Republican lawmakers to withdraw their support for the measure, Trump abruptly reversed course Sunday night.
“House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics,” he wrote in a lengthy post on Truth Social, saying: “the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE! All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT.”
While the Justice Department has generally operated with political independence since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Trump has not held to that tradition. The president has not instructed the department to release all the files, which it could do without an act of Congress, but has asked for Epstein’s relationship with Trump’s political opponents to be investigated.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, sponsored by Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, directs the Justice Department to release the estimated 100,000 pages of files it has related to Epstein, who died in federal custody after being arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019; his death was ruled a suicide. Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Khanna, a California Democrat, used a procedural tool known as a discharge petition to circumvent opposition from Republican House leadership to get the bill to the House floor.
The push to release the Epstein files has caused discord within Trump’s base of supporters and frustrated Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed it as “a hoax.” Trump was friendly with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s, but has said the two had a falling out before Epstein became a convicted sex offender in 2008. Trump has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing.
Top officials in the Justice Department, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, have declined to release the files despite pledging to do so during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight panel, charged in a statement Monday that Trump “is leading a White House cover-up.”
“Let’s be crystal clear: Trump has the power to release all the files today,” Garcia said. “And he is under subpoena to do so. But instead, he wants to continue this cover-up and launch bogus new investigations to deflect and slow down our investigation. It won’t work. We will get justice for the survivors.”
The measure will next go to the Senate, where it needs 60 votes in the Republican-controlled chamber to pass.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state-level counts of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida as part of a controversial nonprosecution agreement that effectively shut down an FBI investigation into sex trafficking. In 2019, after the Miami Herald published an investigation into the accusations against Epstein and the terms of his plea deal, federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking conspiracy. They said in an indictment charging him that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls” in Florida and New York.
Several Epstein survivors appeared in a national public service announcement on Sunday put out by the nonprofit World Without Exploitation, holding photos of their younger selves at the time they met Epstein, to urge release of the files. “Five administrations and we’re still in the dark,” the PSA said.
The House Oversight panel is conducting its own investigation of the Epstein matter. Last Wednesday, lawmakers released a trove of over 20,000 documents and emails that lawmakers obtained from a subpoena of Epstein’s estate. The emails show that Epstein was in correspondence with many influential figures well after he pleaded guilty to state-level sex offenses. In many of the emails, Epstein muses about what Trump knew about the case against him, alternatively insulting Trump and casting himself as a Trump insider.
The documents obtained from Epstein’s estate are separate from those in the possession of the Justice Department that the Trump administration has largely declined to release voluntarily. While Epstein survivors and their lawyers are pushing for the release of the files, there are many outstanding questions about what is in them.
“What these documents also suggest is that the burden continues to be on the survivors to bring this story forward; it’s not on the government,” said Jennifer Freeman, an attorney specializing in sex abuse cases and special counsel at the Marsh Law Firm, where she represents Epstein survivors. “And this is all part of what I’ve been so frustrated about, which is that this is one of the largest government and law enforcement failures in U.S. history.”
It’s not clear, Freeman said, whether the Justice Department has relevant documents that shed light on Epstein’s relationships with financial institutions, his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and others who may have been implicated in Epstein’s activities. She hopes the files include the FBI’s interviews with Epstein survivors that it conducted as part of its investigations.
“It sounds like what the Department of Justice has is whatever the investigators had for their particular prosecutions, which doesn’t necessarily answer many of the questions that we all have,” she said.
Freeman represents Maria Farmer, who first reported Epstein to the FBI in 1996 and spoke to the authorities again in 2006 as federal investigators were probing Epstein for sex trafficking. Farmer filed a lawsuit against the federal government in May, claiming the Justice Department and FBI were negligent in failing to protect Epstein’s victims.
“When they had a chance to do something in the 2005 to 2008 time frame, they gave Epstein this powder-puff non-prosecution agreement,” Freeman said. “So this government, law enforcement failure is just enormous, and so this failure to release the files is part of this.”
Farmer’s lawsuit, which is still in its early stages, is another avenue through which the government could release more documents and evidence. The Epstein files, Freeman said, “will come out one way or another.”
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