After overwhelming support from the House of Representatives – 427 votes in favor and one against – the 100 members of the US Senate unanimously agreed Tuesday to send the Einstein Files Transparency Act to the White House without any changes. The law requires the Justice Department to declassify documents related to the disgraced financier’s case.
They did so even before the text officially reached them for review and voting. That means as soon as it gets to the Senate, it will automatically move to President Donald Trump’s desk. Although he spent months opposing the release of these materials, he has now promised to sign the act as soon as possible.
The urgency came from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who at around 5pm (Washington time), just hours after the House vote, forced what Capitol Hill calls “unanimous consent,” eliminating the possibility that the bill could stall in the upper chamber. “This is about giving the American people the transparency they crave,” Schumer said before pushing for the bill’s passage. “Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have waited long enough.”
It was unclear whether the president would sign the bill Tuesday evening, as he was scheduled to have dinner with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Trump hosted that morning at the White House. When asked by a reporter about the heinous murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, a Washington Post columnist, Trump responded: “Things happen.” American intelligence confirmed Bin Salman’s involvement. The presidential signing was ultimately postponed until Wednesday.
The president’s response
Trump, who tends to lose his temper when it comes to the Epstein dossier, reacted to the news that the Senate also supported its release with a message on his social media platform, Truth Social. “I don’t care when the Senate passes the House bill, whether tonight or sometime in the near future; I just don’t want Republicans to take their eyes off all the victories we’ve won,” he wrote, before proceeding to list those accomplishments, which were a mix of lies, half-truths and exaggerations.
After weeks of lobbying against the bill, the president – a friend of Epstein for 15 years – gave Republican permission last Sunday to vote in favor of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Although he did not go as far as he could have: he has the authority to order the publication of the dossiers without congressional approval but he chose not to do so. The documents could reveal the involvement of dozens of wealthy and influential men in Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, as well as the complicity of financial institutions and legal entities, or the failures of authorities that allowed him to act with impunity.
It’s also unclear what will happen after Trump signs the bill, as he promised. Nor is it clear when or how the Justice Department will comply with its obligation to release the files. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced last July that the Justice Department had no intention of releasing the documents, despite promising to do so for months.
In his possession are millions of previously unpublished documents containing information about Epstein’s sex trafficking network. They are also expected to contain information about who knew about or participated in the operation between the early 1990s and his death (suicide, according to the medical examiner). Epstein died in 2019 while being held in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan.
The question now is whether the Justice Department intends to resist disclosure of the files, arguing that judicial investigations are underway. It all depends on whether the president’s orders to Attorney General Bondi — to investigate Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats — are carried out.
Last Friday, in a move that violates the principle of separation of powers in the United States, Trump asked Bondi to open investigations only against prominent Democrats whose names appeared in subsequent document releases. I mentioned three: former President Bill Clinton; Larry Summers, former president of Harvard; and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman.
US law prohibits the release of material from a case file while the case remains active, and Democrats fear the Trump administration will use this as justification to continue refusing to release the documents.
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