Shreve
WASHINGTON — Rep. Jefferson Shreve, R-Ind., has voted in favor of legislation that would force the Justice Department to publicly release its files on the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The House voted 427-1 on Tuesday to pass the legislation, which would force the Justice Department to release all unclassified files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison, The Associated Press reported. Information about Epstein’s victims or ongoing federal investigations would be allowed to be redacted. The legislation now heads to the Senate.
Epstein was a well-connected financier who killed himself in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in 2019 on charges he sexually abused and trafficked underage girls. He previously pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl, according to court records.
“I support transparency and the release of the Epstein files,” Shreve said in a statement to The Republic.
The vote comes after Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., introduced a discharge petition in July to force a vote on their bill. That is a rarely successful tool that allows a majority of members to bypass House leadership and force a floor vote.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had panned the discharge petition effort and sent members home early for their August recess when the GOP’s legislative agenda was upended in the clamoring for an Epstein vote, according to wire reports. Democrats also contend the seating of Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., was stalled to delay her becoming the 218th member to sign the petition and gain the threshold needed to force a vote. She became the 218th signature moments after taking the oath of office last week.
The vote also comes at a time when new documents are raising fresh questions about Epstein and his associates, including a 2019 email that Epstein wrote to a journalist that said President Donald Trump “knew about the girls,” according to wire reports. The White House has accused Democrats of selectively leaking the emails to smear the Republican president.
Trump’s association with Epstein is well-established and the president’s name was included in records that his own Justice Department released in February as part of an effort to satisfy public interest in information from the sex-trafficking investigation. Trump has said he cut ties with Epstein years ago but tried for months to move past the demands for disclosing the files.
On Sunday, Trump said House Republicans should vote to release the files in the Epstein case, a startling reversal after previously fighting the proposal as a growing number of those in his own party supported it, according to wire reports.
Trump’s statement followed a fierce fight within the GOP over the files, including an increasingly nasty split with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had long been one of his fiercest supporters.
“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 social media late Sunday after landing at Joint Base Andrews following a weekend in Florida.
In September, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a sexually suggestive letter to Epstein purportedly signed by Trump for the late financier and convicted sex offender’s 50th birthday album, according to wire reports.
Trump has denied that he wrote the letter or created the drawing of a curvaceous woman that surrounds the letter, and he filed a $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal for earlier reporting on his link to the letter.
In July, Trump told reporters that Epstein “stole” young women who worked for the spa at Mar-a-Lago, expanding on remarks he had made a day earlier, when he said he had banned Epstein from his private club in Florida two decades ago because his one-time friend “stole people that worked for me,” according to wire reports.
Last year, a former model accused Trump of groping her at Trump Tower in early 1993 as Epstein allegedly watched, according to wire reports. A Trump spokeswoman called the allegations “unequivocally false” and argued they were politically motivated.
A few years before Epstein was arrested for the first time, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein is “a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life,” according to the AP.
Trump has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and the mere inclusion of someone’s name in files from the investigation does not imply otherwise, according to wire reports. Epstein also had many prominent acquaintances in political and celebrity circles besides Trump.
Earlier this year, Trump faced an outcry earlier this year over his administration’s refusal to release more records about Epstein after promises of transparency, a rare example of strain within the president’s tightly controlled political coalition, according to wire reports. Trump has attempted to tamp down questions about the case, expressing annoyance that people are still talking about it six years after Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial, even though some of his own allies have promoted conspiracy theories about it.
Earlier this year, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s imprisoned former girlfriend, was interviewed inside a Florida courthouse by the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, according to wire reports.
Following the interview, Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a prison camp in Texas. Minimum-security federal prison camps house inmates the Bureau of Prisons considers to be the lowest security risk. Some don’t even have fences.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, according to wire reports. She had been held at a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, until her transfer to the prison camp in Texas.
—The Associated Press contributed to this report
