US President Donald Trump asked Republican lawmakers this Sunday to vote to release all documents of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a vote scheduled for Tuesday despite the president’s long-standing opposition.
“House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move past this Democratic hoax perpetrated by radical left-wing crazies to distract from the great success of the Republican Party,” Trump writes in a message posted on the social network he owns, TruthSocial.
On Tuesday, Congress will vote to request the publication of files to be declassified relating to Epstein, a financier who committed suicide in 2019, after last week House Democrats released three new emails from the millionaire pedophile and in one of them Epstein wrote that Trump “spent hours” at the financier’s home with one of his victims.
Trump, who was friends with the financier and later promised during the campaign to reveal all files on his sex crimes, such as child prostitution, says in his message that “the Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages about Epstein to the public.” “They are looking into several Democratic operatives (Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, etc.) and their relationship with Epstein, and the Congressional Oversight Committee may have everything they are legally entitled to,” he says.
The US president on Friday denied criminal links to Epstein, saying he had “made up memos” about him. In this context, he now argues that “no one cared about Epstein when he was alive and that if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it after the “landslide” election victory in 2024. “Some members of the Republican Party are being used and we cannot allow it. Let’s start talking about the record results of the Republican Party and not fall into the Epstein trap”, he concludes.
The US president’s change of position comes after a petition to force a vote on the declassification of the files obtained the necessary votes with the support of some Republicans. Many of those who make up this group have predicted that, if it reaches the plenary session, dozens of Republicans would vote for it, with Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie saying the number could reach as high as a hundred, nearly half of the 2019 incumbents on the Republican bench. If the House of Representatives were to approve the measure, it would still have to be approved by the Senate and signed by Trump for the publication to take effect. Last week these two steps still seemed uncertain, but Trump’s statement suggests they could be achieved. In the Senate, the proposal could require up to 13 Republican votes.
