WASHINGTON — The House passed a resolution compelling the Department of Justice to release its full investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, marking an about-face for GOP leaders after months of intense pushback from the White House.
Lawmakers voted 427-1 to release the full Epstein files with nearly all Republicans voting in favor — something that would have been considered highly unlikely just 2½ months ago when the petition was first filed. President Donald Trump spent months pressuring Republicans not to support the measure, a stance he abruptly reversed on Sunday night when he urged party members to “get BACK ON POINT.”
“We have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I DON’T CARE!”
That post quickly got Republicans on board to back the measure, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who announced on Tuesday that he would vote to move the resolution forward. All four members of Utah’s House delegation voted in favor of the bill.
The vote was nearly unanimous, with only one Republican voting no: Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana.
“Everybody here, all the Republicans, want to go on record to show maximum transparency,” Johnson told reporters.
The bill now heads to the Senate where it must also garner bipartisan support to pass, after which it would need Trump’s signature to take effect. The president indicated earlier this week he would sign the bill if it reached his desk.
But that’s not to say it will be easy. Senate Republicans will likely face pressure to pass the bill as it’s written while Johnson suggested there could be changes made to the underlying resolution to better ensure protections for victims and whistleblowers.
“We’re talking about real people’s lives at stake here, and young victims who don’t want to be dragged into this political game that could get hurt further. The Democrats are rushing their release of thousands of unsubstantiated documents that may be included in this that are going to be in the public domain with this passage of this bill,” Johnson said in a floor speech ahead of the vote.
“There are serious deficiencies in the legislation that I have noted at length, and Republicans have to work to address those deficiencies in the Senate if and when this legislation is advanced,” he added.
Utah Rep. Blake Moore expressed similar concerns, telling the Deseret News he is “confident changes can be made throughout this process” to make it a better bill.
However, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., appeared to close the door to any amendments on Tuesday, pointing to the near-unanimity in the House.
“When a bill passes the House 427-1, and the president said he’ll sign it into law, I’m not sure there’s going to be a need for or a desire for an amendment process over here,” Thune told reporters.
Thune said he expects the process to move quickly in the Senate, with a vote as early as this week.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., filed what is known as a discharge petition in early September that allows rank-and-file lawmakers to force a vote on legislation even without leadership approval so long as they get a majority of the chamber to sign on.
That was accomplished on Wednesday when Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., was sworn into office and signed the petition, making her the 218th and final signature needed.
In order to be successful, the petition required at least four Republicans to sign on. The signatories included Massie as well as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
Trump had tried to convince Boebert to remove her signature by inviting her to the White House last week for a meeting in the Situation Room, according to The New York Times, but the Colorado Republican remained on the petition.
Meanwhile, the president has engaged in an all-out war of words with Greene, who once was one of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress. Since the effort garnered the required number of signatures, Trump has posted multiple times about Greene, even in one post calling her a “traitor.”
Greene claimed the falling-out was caused by her support for releasing the Epstein files, although Trump has broadly accused the Georgia Republican for being a Republican In Name Only, or “RINO.” That comes after Greene publicly criticized several of the Trump administration’s policies over the last year, including on healthcare.
The infighting underscores just how politically toxic the Epstein files have become, especially after Trump spent much of his time on the campaign trail promising to make those documents public but then reversing course to call them a distraction.
Pressure from the Republican base has only grown after documents released from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee last week included an email in which Epstein suggested Trump “knew about the girls,” but never engaged in illicit activity.
But Trump has since reversed that stance, arguing Republicans should get it over with and move on — even suggesting the release of the files would be worse for Democrats, who make up the majority of the petition’s signatures, because of who is named in the files.