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.
The way Republicans are handling this is actually extremely unpopular with the MAGA crowd too, it’s basically the first time that Trump’s base has been in outright disagreement with him on an issue. Pretty much every political demographic in the country is in agreement re: Epstein disclosures. I think we need to show some critical support to the majority of Republicans who want the full files released, at least on this specific issue, in order to keep the pressure up until congress comes back from their big long vacation. Everybody is angry about this. They want it, we want it, let’s keep the energy up.
How do you even justify NOT releasing the files? Nobody has offered a single believable reason to hide them, other than to protect bad people from responsibility. It’s pretty hard to stand in the spotlight and claim you are doing the right thing.
The only possible justifications are “to protect victims” and “to protect people from baseless accusations” if there really is no proof of anything.
The first can be done with retractions. The latter is the issue for MAGA, as trump and his boosters have been claiming for years that the files are full of vile, evil shit that is being hidden and that they would expose everyone. They claimed this for half a decade, and were saying the truth was about to come out just months ago. They claimed they put 10,000 FBI agents on the case to verify the files, and gave MAGA influencers a “part 1” dossier to splash around.
Suddenly, a few months later there is nothing to see, even as more and more leaks about Trump being a pedophile hit the news.
Now they are playing games about releasing “credible” reports (i.e nothing with Trump in them or any republicans) and releasing everything but the files.