House GOP leaders returning to Capitol Hill this week from the long summer break will be immediately confronted with the radioactive subject of Jeffrey Epstein.
Top Republicans had accelerated their July exit from Washington in part to avoid the thorny Epstein saga and were hoping the attention swirling around the convicted sex offender would dissolve over the five-week recess, allowing Congress to move on to other things in September.
Instead, the focus on Epstein is poised to erupt beginning in the earliest days of Congress’s return, creating challenges for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and GOP leaders just as they’re racing to prevent a government shutdown on Sept. 30.
The issue will come at them from various angles — and quickly.
On Wednesday, a pair of bipartisan lawmakers will host a press event at the Capitol to advance their efforts to force the Trump administration to release all of the government’s Epstein files. To ramp up the pressure, the lawmakers — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) — will be joined by several survivors of Epstein’s abuse.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have subpoenaed the Epstein estate for a slew of sensitive documents, including anything resembling a “client list” and Epstein’s “birthday book” — a 2003 volume, compiled by his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, that reportedly includes a lewd letter written by President Trump when he was a private citizen in New York. Those materials are slated for delivery to Capitol Hill by Sept. 8.
And the House Rules Committee, which Republicans shut down in late July to avoid Epstein-related votes, will have to resolve that impasse if GOP leaders want to move virtually any significant piece of legislation to the floor.
The combination is sure to challenge Johnson and other GOP leaders, who have sought unsuccessfully to defuse the Epstein controversy and would prefer to focus their energies on keeping the government open beyond September.
Democrats, meanwhile, are only eager to keep the story alive.
“We’re not going to stop talking about this,” said a House Democratic aide familiar with the debate.
If it were just Democrats clamoring for the Epstein files, GOP leaders would have an easier time brushing the issue aside. But some prominent voices in the House GOP conference, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), a close Trump ally, have been an active part of the pressure campaign demanding that the Department of Justice (DOJ) publicize the documents.
Those conservatives were not convinced by the DOJ’s July memo refuting the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein, including the central claim that the government is concealing his case files to protect powerful “elites” who committed crimes against minors. And they haven’t been silenced by President Trump’s calls to forget the Epstein “hoax,” or his threats to disavow any supporters who continue to press for more information.
Greene, for one, warned Trump that refusing to release the files risks losing the bulk of his MAGA base.
“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” she posted on the social platform X. “If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back.”
The issue has put Republican leaders in a bind, squeezed between their loyalty to a president who wants the issue to go away and conservatives in and out of Congress demanding that it doesn’t.
Massie is leading that charge on Capitol Hill. He’s pushing a procedural gambit, known as a discharge petition, to force a vote on his legislation with Khanna. The bill would require the DOJ to post, in searchable form, every record the agency possesses related to its investigations into both Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019, and Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for crimes related to the sexual abuse of minors.
Under the bill, redactions are permitted to protect the identity of victims but are prohibited for purposes of preventing “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
That resolution currently has 11 other Republican co-sponsors, in addition to Massie. The key question heading into September is whether those GOP lawmakers will go a long step further in their defiance of Trump by signing the discharge petition, which requires 218 signatures to force a vote on the floor.
Johnson said Friday on CNN that the House would “probably” vote on an Epstein-related resolution.
“There may be a floor vote of one measure or another. We have our own resolutions to do all this, but I don’t — it’s sort of not necessary at the point because the administration is already doing this. They’re turning it over,” he said.
Pressed on the discharge petition, he responded, “We might not even wait for that. We have our own resolutions to affect this same thing, but the process is playing out as it should, and very soon the American people will have that information, and they should have had it all along. That’s my view.”
A similar question surrounds the Rules Committee. The panel was brought to a halt in July when Democrats offered a series of Epstein-related amendments that committee Republicans hoped to avoid, not least because of the MAGA backlash some faced in opposing those measures.
GOP leaders in Congress and the administration are taking aggressive steps to ease the various Republican concerns, and tamp down any potential internal revolt, when Congress returns this week.
In subpoenaing Epstein’s estate, the Oversight Committee is seeking a host of documents spanning nearly three decades, including Epstein’s will, any contact lists he kept, and flight logs on his aircraft. Oversight Republicans had also subpoenaed the DOJ earlier this month for Epstein documents.
Meanwhile, the panel is set to interview Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney for South Florida who’s come under fire for cutting a nonprosecution deal with Epstein after his first arrest for underage sex crimes in 2006; and the committee has also subpoenaed former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had ties to Epstein and Maxwell in years past. They are scheduled to be interviewed by the panel in October.
Separately, a top DOJ official this month interviewed Maxwell in prison, and the agency released the full transcript of the exchange.
It remains uncertain, however, if all of that movement will appease the Republicans who have sought the DOJ’s comprehensive files on the Epstein and Maxwell cases — information that was not disclosed, critics said, when the department delivered some documents to the Oversight panel on Aug. 22 in response to the earlier subpoena.
Khanna said 97 percent of those files had been previously made public.
“Less than 1 percent of files have been released. DOJ is stonewalling,” Khanna said in response.
“The survivors deserve justice and the public deserves transparency.”
