The reason it feels like Congress doesn’t exist anymore is because it functionally doesn’t, but also because this summer vacation was extended. House Republicans tucked tail and left early after fearing the possibility of having to vote for transparency about the biggest underage sex ring in U.S. history, which gives you a good sense of where we are with that party right now.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had six weeks to figure out how to manage the intra-party rebellion over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Republican members were still getting an earful at home, so ducking a vote wasn’t practical. But Johnson needed to uphold his prime directive of acting as a human shield for the president and keeping his name out of any revelations.
So after weeks of rumination, here’s what Johnson came up with: a resolution, hastily added to the week’s floor voting schedule on Monday, that would “direct” the House Oversight Committee to continue investigating the federal cases against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, which is already in progress. In other words, Johnson would have the House vote to do something it is effectively already doing.
The word you may be grasping for is “misdirection.”
This resolution is being floated for a vote to keep people away from a bipartisan bill from Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Tom Massie (R-KY), which would directly compel the relevant government agencies to release all relevant files. Yesterday, Khanna and Massie launched the discharge petition process for their bill. If it gets signatures from a majority of House members, that bill will have to come to the floor, and the co-authors say they already have that many in hand. They’re holding a press conference this morning with victims of Epstein’s sex ring.
Related: Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue
Johnson’s gambit is to claim that he’s already giving supporters of releasing the files a vote, so they shouldn’t have to sign onto the discharge petition. That is the hard sell that both the House Republican leadership and the White House, which is apparently whipping members to not sign onto the discharge petition, are making.
This is as much about Johnson controlling what gets on his House floor (which could trigger other bypass attempts, like on a congressional stock trading ban), but it’s based on a misimpression that the “attaboy Oversight Committee” resolution is the same as the Khanna-Massie bill.
It’s true that the Oversight Committee has issued subpoenas to the Justice Department for Epstein files, after Democrats forced a vote on the matter. In the hands of committee chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the subpoenas are rather selective. Depositions with the Clintons are atop the list, for example, and Bill Clinton has been called a “prime suspect” in the inquiry. A MAGA enemies list of James Comey, Eric Holder, and Robert Mueller were also on the list (Mueller was later taken off because of Parkinson’s disease rendering him unfit to testify). But initially, Alex Acosta, the former Trump labor secretary who secured a sweetheart deal with Epstein while U.S. Attorney that enabled him to plead to a lesser state charge, wasn’t on the list at all, though after bipartisan prodding he got added later.
The point is that the Oversight Committee is somewhat in the tank. The records that DOJ has turned over thus far, according to Democrats on the committee, were almost all already public. Just three percent of the tens of thousands of pages DOJ handed in were not previously available. After a meeting with Epstein victims, the Oversight Committee released the files received onto a Google Drive, but again, nearly all of them are already out there. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) gave away the game by posting on X, “I don’t think the vote to release the Epstein files will even come to the floor being that they will all be made public.” Yes, that is definitely the hope!
Comer claims there are more files coming, but DOJ seems to be in control of the timing of the releases, which is part of a strategy of delay. The Epstein estate has also been hit with subpoenas for a bunch of documents, including the infamous “birthday book” that Trump reportedly contributed to.
In the meantime, DOJ released a transcript of a conversation between top officials and Maxwell, perhaps the most self-serving document release in U.S. history. Maxwell already got moved to a cushy prison camp and very obviously wants a pardon, and DOJ wanted her to say that Trump wasn’t involved in any funny stuff, and both sides played their roles. The transcript barely caused a ripple in the public impression of the case because it was so clearly a piece of political marketing.
So we had the misdirection by asking for a doomed grand jury testimony release, which was rapidly shot down; the misdirection by releasing the Maxwell transcript, which was so scripted it could be Emmy-eligible; and now the misdirection of a House vote that just blesses an existing, inadequate process, along with a “public release” of documents that are already public.
The Johnson-led resolution states that the Oversight Committee shall make available records from the Justice and Treasury Departments and the Epstein estate. But that’s of course contingent on DOJ and Treasury giving the committee records. What the committee releases, the resolution adds, should not be redacted to protect anyone from embarrassment or political scrutiny, but that’s only binding on the committee; it does not force unredacted documents out of the executive branch agencies. The only thing the resolution asks of those agencies is to provide written justification for the redaction, and since only the agencies would know what the redaction is, that’s rather easily done.
The Khanna-Massie bill, by contrast, requires public delivery, not filtered through a friendly committee chair, of all materials in DOJ’s possession, and it creates a 30-day deadline for a searchable and downloadable records. There are some exceptions where documents can be withheld or redacted that are similar to the Johnson resolution: personally identifiable information, images of child sexual abuse or physical abuse or injury, records that would jeopardize an active investigation, or national security information.
It’s about how the richest and most powerful people in the country can get away with anything.
Written justification is also required for redacting or withholding this information, but the Khanna-Massie bill requires declassification “to the maximum extent possible” and even calls for unclassified summaries to be released. And Khanna-Massie requires the attorney general to essentially make her own “Epstein list” of all “government officials and politically exposed persons named or referenced in the released materials, with no redactions permitted.” I don’t think it’s perfect, but it would create a lot more pressure than the handshake agreement that is the Comer investigation.
As I have said before, the Epstein case is an actual policy issue; it’s about how the richest and most powerful people in the country can get away with anything. Whether this was about Trump or not, Epstein would be a worthy subject for congressional oversight. The fact that the president of the United States has a decades-long relationship with the guy, and is frantically trying to get everyone to stop talking about that, makes it even worthier. Accountability has been so sorely lacking in America that a bipartisan effort in that direction feels like a foreign concept. But it doesn’t look like deflections and delays will outrun the determination at finding the truth.