Speaker Mike Johnson said he would send lawmakers home early for their summer recess in order to head off Democratic demands for votes on calling for the release of files from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Johnson implied that his concerns about transparency had been alleviated, for now, by Mr. Trump’s move to authorize Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the public release of grand jury testimony from the prosecution of Mr. Epstein. That is a far cry from the breadth of information the president’s supporters have demanded, yet it appeared to be enough to persuade the speaker.
Edit
This thread used to link to https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/07/22/us/trump-news/0d8c9050-dee0-5253-89b2-30e4737090c1, a live thread linked from NYT’s “Breaking news” newsletter, which headlined it “Johnson Shutting Down House Early to Block Epstein Vote”. Now that the NYT has made a standalone article, I’ve replaced this post’s link with that article’s gift link, courtesy of the relevant subcommag.
While I understand the sentiment, I don’t feel like that’s a particularly fresh revelation… If anything, I was surprised at the handful of dissenting voices on the right. Even before this latest wave of Epstein news, I was willing to bet Trump could just straight up admit to pedophilia and still wouldn’t lose much of his base.
I think the Trump regime is getting push back on Epstein because they made a big deal of it during the campaign. And a bunch of their talking heads piled on the Epstein will out a bunch of Dems fantasy.