Donald Trump might have banked on the long August recess letting the Epstein Files outrage die down, but Congress is back in session and his critics are madder than ever.
There is even a bipartisan attempt to force a floor vote on releasing the Epstein files, a demand at the heart of a Trump-fueled MAGA conspiracy theory that the disgraced financier was killed as part of a cover-up.
Democratic California Representative Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie have co-authored a resolution to force the Justice Department to release Epstein investigative documents.
Khanna said he believed there were enough signatures to hold a floor vote on the legislation. They will also have a news conference on Wednesday at the Capitol, featuring testimony from survivors of Epstein’s sex trafficking conspiracy.
“The testimonials from Epstein’s victims are going to be explosive on Sept. 3, and I am confident all 212 Democrats will sign [the petition] and we will have more than six Republicans sign,” he said.
Khanna and Massie are pushing ahead with a discharge petition, a congressional process that would allow them to bypass the GOP’s leadership and force a House vote on whether to have the Justice Department release files on the Epstein case.
Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far staunchly opposed the initiative, previously describing it as a “moot point” and “not necessary” given an ongoing review by the House Oversight Committee of some 100,000 documents already provided by the DoJ, with more to follow in the coming weeks.
Having long courted far-right conspiracy theorists who believe Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were members of an international pedophilic cabal, Trump has lately found his own relationship with the late, disgraced financier back in the spotlight.
Despite repeated pledges on last year’s campaign trail to release new findings on the case, the MAGA White House sparked a fierce backlash in June when the DoJ and FBI determined Epstein’s 2019 death in police custody was a suicide, and that the sex trafficker’s long-rumored “client list” of uber-wealthy accomplices—which Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February was “sitting on my desk”—does not exist.
The Wall Street Journal later added fuel to the fire with a report about how, in 2003, Trump allegedly sent Epstein a birthday card featuring a crude sketch of a naked woman and a bizarre imagined exchange between the two men about “enigmas” and “wonderful secrets.”
As he forges ahead with a $10 billion defamation suit against the newspaper over those allegations, speculation has continued to mount that Trump, who once described Epstein as a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women… on the younger side,” may be planning a pardon for Epstein co-conspirator Maxwell.
In July, Maxwell is understood to have sat down for a nine-hour interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is also Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, during which she reportedly said she never witnessed the president do anything that might have been a cause for concern.
Federal authorities have since transferred her from the Florida prison where she had been serving her 20-year sentence on sex trafficking charges to a minimum-security facility in Texas.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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