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The House is poised to overwhelmingly approve legislation Tuesday that would force the Justice Department to publicly release all records related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a dramatic culmination of months of bipartisan pressure and a sudden shift in support from President Donald Trump.
The measure, authored by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., secured enough Republican co-sponsors last week to bypass leadership and head straight to the floor — an unusually strong bipartisan coalition that strengthened further after Trump abruptly endorsed the bill Sunday night. GOP lawmakers now expect the vote margin to be so lopsided that it could approach or exceed a veto-proof majority.
“Almost everybody” will vote for it, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said Monday, noting that party leaders are not pressuring members to take any particular position.
A new test for the Senate
A landslide House vote would intensify pressure on the Republican-controlled Senate, where leaders say they support transparency on the Epstein case but have not committed to bringing the bill up.
“We’ll see if they send something to the Senate,” Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “But we want transparency and accountability.”
The legislation would require the attorney general to release, within 30 days of enactment, all unclassified records tied to Epstein and his network, including flight logs, internal Justice Department communications, investigative files on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and names of individuals or entities connected to him. The bill allows Attorney General Pam Bondi to redact victim identities or information that could jeopardize active federal investigations.
White House reversal
Inside the House, momentum accelerated after Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., signed the discharge petition as the 218th member. That triggered a wave of Republican commitments that complicated efforts by Trump and the White House, which had quietly urged a handful of GOP women to withdraw their support.
By Friday, those efforts collapsed. Facing mass Republican defections and warnings from congressional allies that resistance was untenable, Trump changed course.
On Sunday night, he posted on Truth Social urging Republicans to support the bill. Speaking to reporters Monday, he said he would sign the legislation, arguing that disclosing the records would help the GOP “turn the page” and return focus to the economy.
“Some of the people that we mentioned are being looked at very seriously for their relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, but they were with him all the time — I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all,” Trump said, adding that he did not want the issue to distract from the government shutdown, which he said voters blame on Democrats.
A conservative House Republican close to Trump told NBC News that the White House’s early strategy — dismissing concerns about transparency and leaning on reluctant members — infuriated much of the GOP conference.
Existing records and political stakes
The Justice Department has already delivered tens of thousands of documents to the House Oversight Committee, which has published many of them as part of its own investigation. Committee Democrats last week released emails Epstein sent in 2019 to Ghislaine Maxwell and journalist Michael Wolff, which referenced Trump but did not accuse him of criminal conduct.
Trump has repeatedly denied involvement in Epstein’s crimes. The two socialized in the 1980s and 1990s, including at a 1992 Mar-a-Lago party captured on video, before they fell out in the 2000s. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting a minor, and federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking in 2019. He died weeks later in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who has argued the bill is unnecessary because of ongoing Oversight disclosures, sidestepped questions Monday about Trump’s flip. He reiterated that protecting victims must remain the primary concern.
“He’s never had anything to hide,” Johnson said of Trump. “We wanted to ensure victims of these heinous crimes are completely protected from disclosure. I’m not sure the discharge petition does that, and that’s part of the problem.”
What’s next
Tuesday’s vote will reveal the size of the bipartisan coalition — and whether it is large enough to pressure Senate Republicans into acting. Massie and Khanna are appearing with Epstein survivors ahead of the vote and are asking Trump to meet with them.
“Republicans need to look past 2028 and wonder if they want this on their record,” Massie said.
If the bill clears Congress and becomes law, the Justice Department would have one month to release the largest trove of Epstein-related documents ever made public — a disclosure likely to echo across politics, finance and law enforcement.
