The question is not whether the Epstein Papers Transparency Act will pass this Tuesday in the House of Representatives, but how much Republican support the rule requiring the Department of Justice to declassify documents related to the case of the millionaire pedophile, which Donald Trump and his administration have been opposing for months, will receive. Once this first step had been passed, the question of how many obstacles it would receive on its way from the Senate to the desk of the President of the United States, who promised to sign it, also remained to be resolved.
The answer to the first question was: all except one, Clay Higgins, representative of Louisiana. The explanation for this overwhelming support? After weeks of pressure to the contrary, Trump, a friend of Epstein for 15 years, last Sunday gave permission to Republican lawmakers to vote in favor of the law. Even if he didn’t get to the bottom of it: it is within his power to order the disclosure without Capitol permission of those files, which could reveal the involvement of dozens of rich and influential men in the pedophile’s sex trafficking network, as well as the complicity of financial institutions and judicial bodies or the shortcomings of the authorities that allowed him to act with impunity.
As for the second question, it is still too early to answer. Although the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, whose decision to hold the upper house for 54 days delayed the legislative process while enduring the longest administrative shutdown in US history, on Tuesday morning ventured that the upper house would introduce amendments to the text. Johnson criticized the law because, he said, it “contains no provisions to protect the identity of victims,” despite the fact that dozens of them came to the Capitol on Tuesday to pressure him and his family for its passage.
Al speaker He is also concerned that the reputations of those in Epstein’s circle of influence — who committed his crimes between the early 1990s and his death (a suicide, according to the medical examiner) in 2019 in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan while awaiting trial as the ringleader of an international child sex trafficking ring — will be damaged by the publication of these materials, should they ultimately prove not guilty.
“The legislation has serious deficiencies. And Republicans must work to address those deficiencies in the Senate if this legislation passes,” Johnson said shortly before the vote. Despite this, and despite the fact that his men had worked for months to prevent that moment from coming, he ventured that support would be unanimous.
If House Republicans choose to touch the text, it promises to delay, perhaps until early next year, a journey that began after Attorney General Pam Bondi said last July that she would not release Esptein’s files, despite having promised to do so for months.
This change of heart, preceded by a White House meeting in which Bondi warned Trump that his name was “everywhere” on the millionaire pedophile’s documents, put the House Oversight Committee to work, which received about 65,000 pages of documents – the latest batch, of about 20,000 emails, last week – through court requests to Epstein’s family. Its members have also requested material from the Department of Justice, which has an enormous amount of material, amounting to millions of pages, but the Trump administration has repeatedly refused to cooperate with their investigations.
From both parties
News that the Trump administration would not release the files also forged an alliance between representatives of both parties, Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), to draft the bill on the ballot today. This initiative had the support of all Democrats and four Republicans: in addition to Massie, who on Tuesday declared that he was “ashamed of his party”, representatives Lauren Boebert (Colorado), Nancy Mace (South Carolina) and Marjorie Taylor-Greene (Georgia).
Last Wednesday they summoned Boebert to the White House to unsuccessfully pressure her and try to convince her not to sign the petition advancing the law after the administration reopens. “We had to fight bullying for months,” Greene said shortly before 1 p.m. (local time). He did it on the Democratic side and in front of a chamber where only a handful of representatives were present.
The congresswoman has been one of the most prominent faces of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement on Capitol Hill, but her defense of Epstein’s victims has put her at odds with Trump, who last week repudiated her with a series of aggressive messages calling her a “traitor” that led, she says, to threats and other intimidation tactics from the president’s supporters.
Hours earlier, Greene had spoken at an event alongside dozens of Epstein survivors. It was a challenging press conference, in which many of the victims, just a few of the millionaire pedophile’s hundreds, spoke after showing photos of themselves from when they met Epstein, “some as young as 14,” as Congresswoman Mace recalled when it was her turn to speak on the House floor.
One of them, Haley Robson, spoke for everyone when she told Trump during his appearance on the Capitol steps: “I’m traumatized, but I’m not stupid.” Those who spoke subsequently insisted in their messages to the president of the United States, asking him not to play “politics” with their suffering. They also asked him to stop referring to the attempt to declassify the Epstein documents as a “Democrat hoax.” During the debate on the law, that group of survivors interrupted him with applause for the democratic interventions from the guest gallery.
“What is Trump hiding? What is Bondi hiding?” Rep. Robert Garcia, the highest-ranking member of the oversight committee, asked in an impassioned speech, while on the other hand, Jim Jordan (Ohio) wanted to know why the documents had not even been released during the Biden administration. Jamie Raskin (Maryland) responded by reminding his rivals that for part of those four years there was an ongoing case against Epstein’s accomplice, getter Ghislaine Maxwell. He is now serving a 20-year prison sentence in a minimum-security prison, a prison benefit he accepted after meeting in July with a Justice Department envoy, Todd Blanche, for nine hours on two different days.
US law prohibits the release of summary materials from the trial while he is still alive, and Democrats fear the Trump administration will build on that by continuing to refuse to release the files. Trump asked Bondi last Friday, in a gesture that violates the principle of separation of powers in this country, to open investigations only against prominent Democrats whose names appeared in subsequent document releases. He named three: former President Bill Clinton, former Harvard Chancellor Larry Summers and megadonor Reid Hoffman.
Bondi put a New York prosecutor to work. If these cases prosper, it would serve as an excuse for the Justice Department not to release documents that members of the House of Representatives of both parties asked of it Tuesday, along with dozens of victims who a judge once called “the greatest sexual predator in the history of the United States.”
