House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed Tuesday that he will support a petition to force the Justice Department to release all of the files it has on disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson, who, for months, expressed reservations about the discharge petition led by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), citing concerns over victim privacy, told reporters he would vote to “move this forward” and said he believes it will be “close to a unanimous vote.”
The speaker stood beside a poster board emblazoned with the “dangers of the discharge petition” while addressing reporters at a GOP leadership press conference Tuesday morning. Among the “dangers” listed were victim privacy, risks to innocent persons, and lack of protection against the release of child sexual abuse materials.
“Everybody here, all the Republicans, want to go on record to show their maximum transparency, but they also want to know that we’re demanding that this stuff get corrected before it has ever moved through the process and is complete,” Johnson said.
The Epstein files have proven to be a thorn in the side of GOP leadership, with Reps. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) signing, joining all Democrats, the discharge petition to force a vote on the bill to release the files.
Johnson’s move to support advancing the petition to the upper chamber comes after President Donald Trump gave Republicans the green light to vote for the files’ release.
“House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because 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, including our recent Victory on the Democrat ‘Shutdown,’” Trump said in a post on Truth Social over the weekend.
Even before Trump’s call for Republicans to support the measure, leadership was bracing for several defections, with Massie and Khanna predicting that 40-50 Republicans would vote for the bill.
“The discharge petition got its 218 signatures, and it is going to go forward,” Johnson said, referring to Rep. Adelita Grijalva’s (D-AZ) signing of the petition after she was sworn in last week. “It is going to pass because it only takes 218, and we know that the Democrats have disregarded all these concerns, and they’re going to move it forward anyway. So all the people of good conscience here say we’ve registered our concerns. We stated our opposition as long as possible, but we’re also for maximum transparency.”
Massie, during a press conference with Epstein abuse survivors, called Johnson’s arguments against the measure a “red herring.”
“The survivors have always been in favor of this legislation,” Massie said. “And there’s a provision in there you could read, if he would just read it, that protects them.”
Johnson asserted that the petition does not protect victims because it cites the wrong “section of the U.S. Code.”
“They wrote this thing so quickly that they cited the wrong section,” Johnson said. “So you know what that means. It means that it doesn’t really bestow any real legal authority on the attorney general to redact those materials, and that would compel the DOJ to release that stuff into the public.”
Johnson told reporters he has shared his concerns with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and is “very confident” that if the Senate takes up the measure, his concerns about the petition will be addressed in the upper chamber.
THUNE FACES MOUNTING PRESSURE FROM HOUSE GOP ON EPSTEIN FILES AND ‘ARCTIC FROST’ PROVISION
The Senate has previously voted on the release of the Epstein files after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) forced a floor vote using a procedural tactic. Schumer’s effort failed, with the Republican-led Senate voting 51-49 to table it. Thune has not pledged to hold another vote on the matter.
Schumer said in a statement that if Thune “tries to bury the bill, I’ll stop him,” and that once the House passes the bill, he will move for the Senate to take up the legislation immediately.