President Trump said Sunday that House Republicans should vote to release all files related to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, reversing his earlier stance in which he had urged GOP lawmakers not to support a measure requiring their disclosure. The House is expected to vote Tuesday on a bill that would require the Justice Department to release all materials related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.
The vote is proceeding despite opposition from GOP leadership, after a discharge petition secured the necessary 218 signatures last week. The legislation would also need to pass the Senate and receive President Trump’s signature to become law.
“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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday evening.
As of Sunday night, the president had not indicated whether he would urge Senate Republicans to support the measure or whether he would sign it if it reaches his desk, the New York Post reported.
The discharge petition was signed by all 214 House Democrats, as well as Republicans Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — a development that drew criticism from Trump.
On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 pages of documents provided by Jeffrey Epstein’s estate.
In the emails, Epstein — who died on Aug. 10, 2019, in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges — claimed that former President Trump was aware of his alleged grooming and sexual abuse of underage girls. The documents do not independently corroborate Epstein’s assertions, The Post noted.
“[O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked [G]hislaine to stop,” Epstein wrote to author Michael Wolff in a Jan. 31, 2019, email, referring to Ghislaine Maxwell’s recruitment of victims from the spa at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Wolff’s credibility has been widely questioned.
The next day, Epstein wrote in an email to himself that although “Trump knew of it, and came to my house many times during that period,” the future president “never got a massage.”
Trump and Epstein were known to be socially acquainted during the 1990s and early 2000s before reportedly falling out during a bidding dispute over a now-demolished mansion in Palm Beach, Fla.
On Friday, President Trump said he would direct the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi later confirmed that she had asked Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to lead the inquiry.
“[T]he House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!” Trump reiterated in his Sunday post. “All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT.”
“Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive and, if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it before our Landslide Election Victory. Some ‘members’ of the Republican Party are being ‘used,’ and we can’t let that happen,” he added.
“Let’s start talking about the Republican Party’s Record Setting Achievements, and not fall into the Epstein ‘TRAP,’ which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Newly released documents from Epstein’s estate, meanwhile, show that the convicted sex offender exchanged text messages with a Democratic member of Congress during Michael Cohen’s February 2019 testimony, and that those messages may have influenced the congresswoman’s questioning of Cohen.
The documents, published Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee, include copies of Epstein’s digital communications, emails, and text messages, The Washington Post reported.
In the texts, Epstein appeared to be watching the hearing in real time and notified the congresswoman — whose name was redacted in the documents — that Cohen had mentioned former Trump executive assistant Rhona Graff during his testimony.
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