In September, when Democrats were threatening to jam up Congress by forcing votes on releasing the Epstein files, House G.O.P. leaders devised a strategy to insulate themselves and deliver on President Trump’s demand to shut the issue down.
Rather than facing a vote many Republicans desperately wanted to avoid on whether the files should come out, they would pass a measure that directed the House Oversight Committee to continue an investigation into the Epstein case that it been conducting for weeks.
The move was entirely symbolic. No vote was needed to allow the Republican-led committee to keep up the work that it had begun in July. Democrats had managed to force the chairman to issue a subpoena to the Justice Department for information about its inquiry into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But the maneuver offered Republicans a chance to show their constituents, many of whom were livid after the Trump administration closed its Epstein investigation without releasing the revelations top officials had promised, that their representatives in Congress were committed to transparency. The committee’s investigation was meant to give the G.O.P. some political cover while holding off a rising tide of pressure on the administration to reveal more about its investigation into Mr. Epstein, who died in prison in 2019.
Yet if the panel’s investigation was aimed at easing political pressure on Republicans and Mr. Trump, it appears to have had the opposite effect. The Republican-led committee has, almost in spite of itself, produced a number of striking revelations that have intensified the drumbeat of demands for more transparency and kept attention on Mr. Trump’s past ties to Mr. Epstein. In doing so, the panel has helped to box Speaker Mike Johnson into scheduling the vote he has long avoided — now expected next week — on whether to demand that the Justice Department quickly release all of its Epstein files.
That is partly because of how widely the panel cast its net as it sought to shift the focus away from the Trump administration’s handling of the case. Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the oversight panel, issued subpoenas to an array of other sources, including for a broad set of documents from Mr. Epstein’s estate.
It was Mr. Comer’s subpoena to the estate that led to the release in September of a sexually suggestive drawing and note that appeared to bear Donald J. Trump’s signature, a document from a book that was created for Mr. Epstein’s 50th birthday and that Mr. Trump has insisted he did not create.
The Epstein estate also produced the three email conversations that Democrats selectively released on Wednesday morning that suggested Mr. Epstein believed Mr. Trump may have been more aware of his abuse than the president has acknowledged. Those were contained in a trove with tens of thousands more pages of documents that Republicans released soon after, which have only increased the scrutiny on Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Trump, his allies and his aides have dismissed these disclosures, arguing that Mr. Epstein was a discredited, convicted sex offender who had long fallen out with Mr. Trump. The president called the emails a “hoax,” and top Republicans accused Democrats of cherry-picking material to create a “clear distraction” from their failure to win concessions during the government shutdown.
And though Democrats forced the committee to subpoena the Justice Department for its investigative material, that effort has not borne much fruit. Though the department gave the committee more than 33,000 pages in late summer, the files largely contained information that was already publicly available.
Mr. Comer has defended the investigation, even as it has produced a stream of material that has angered Mr. Trump. On Wednesday night, he told reporters that it would continue.
“We’ve done everything we said we would do on the Oversight Committee,” he said. “I subpoenaed the estate.”
He said that the committee was looking beyond Mr. Trump to explore Mr. Epstein’s well-documented connection to a network of powerful elites, including former President Bill Clinton.
“There’s a lot of prominent people that were associated with Epstein,” he said. “Now, whether they did anything wrong or not, that’s what we’re investigating.”
Mr. Johnson has continued to hold up Mr. Comer’s investigation as his favored avenue for transparency. After an effort to force a vote on a bill that would demand the Epstein files cleared a key hurdle on Wednesday, Mr. Johnson labeled it “reckless” and “totally moot” before pointing to Mr. Comer’s investigation.
It was Democrats on the committee, led by Representative Robert Garcia of California, who initially prompted the panel’s investigation. During an unrelated hearing, they forced a vote on a subpoena to the Justice Department for the Epstein files.
The maneuver worked: A group of Republicans joined them, though they expanded the scope to include a host of political figures, including William P. Barr, who was one of Mr. Trump’s attorneys general in his first term.
Mr. Barr’s testimony backed up some of the Trump administration’s more recent contentions. He said he had no knowledge of a so-called client list — one that many involved in the case had long said did not exist — and that he was not aware of any evidence that would implicate Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.
Days after that testimony, Mr. Comer sent his first subpoena to the Epstein estate.
Because the Justice Department has not disclosed details of its material, it is difficult to know how much overlap there is between its files on Mr. Epstein and the trove from the Epstein estate that the Oversight Committee has so far released.
Democrats have continued to call on the Justice Department to provide more of its material. But they argue that they have kept up the pressure, and that their release of files from the Epstein estate have pushed Republicans to disclose more material.
“We have been very aggressive,” Mr. Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, said on Wednesday. “We’re scrappy. I think that we are guided by justice for the survivors.”
Throughout the process, Mr. Comer has maintained that the focus of his committee would be transparency, and that it would continue to release materials so long as they were properly redacted to remove child sexual abuse material and to strip out identifying information of victims.
Still, it was Republicans on Wednesday who identified Virginia Giuffre as the unnamed victim referred to in two of the messages Democrats released, in which they had redacted her name. The G.O.P. argued that fuller context was needed to clear Mr. Trump of wrongdoing, since Ms. Giuffre had said that she never witnessed him participating in Mr. Epstein’s abuse.
Republicans are still toiling to balance their constituents’ calls for more transparency and their loyalty to Mr. Trump, who has made it clear he wants the Epstein talk to disappear. On Wednesday evening, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee sought to bring up the bill demanding the release of the Epstein files and pass it without a recorded vote, drawing objections from Democrats, who have sought to put the G.O.P. on the record on the matter.
Not long after, Mr. Johnson relented and said he would bring up the bill next week, dispensing with a waiting period proponents otherwise would have faced before they could force a vote.
“In the meantime,” Mr. Johnson added, “I’ll remind everybody the Oversight Committee has been working around the clock.”
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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