Newsman: The Senate moved swiftly to approve legislation Tuesday forcing the Justice Department to release more information about the case it built against the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — acting hours after an overwhelming House vote to send the bill to the desk of President Donald Trump, who spent months trying to kill it.
The Senate acted by unanimous consent, which requires signoff from every senator but does not require them to take a roll call vote. Earlier in the day, the House passed the bill on a 427-1 vote.
“This is about giving the American people the transparency they’ve been crying for,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said before asking for the bill’s approval. “Jeffrey Epstein’s victims have waited long enough.”
Tuesday’s votes caps off a months of drama among congressional Republicans and the White House over how to handle the Epstein files, pitting GOP lawmakers between Trump and their own base.
That included a long campaign to circumvent House Republican leaders and White House officials who fought tooth and nail to convince members of their party to oppose the measure. As Democrats sought to stoke division in the GOP over the administration’s decision to withhold further information in the Epstein case, the issue proved increasingly toxic for Republicans — and Tuesday’s vote became inevitable.
“We have a chance today to make something happen, something that has not happened and should have happened decades ago, and that is to get justice for these victims and survivors and transparency for America,” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who led the effort to force a House vote, later adding that he was “embarrassed for my own party today.”
Only Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), a fervent Trump loyalist, voted against it. Victims of Epstein who had gathered in the House gallery cheered as the vote closed.
Senate GOP leadership had previously downplayed the odds their chamber would take up the House’s Epstein bill, raising the likelihood that even if Massie and his allies were successful it would just be buried across the Capitol.
That all changed over the weekend and Monday when Trump reversed course and urged House lawmakers to pass the bill and said that he would sign it. That reflected concerns that the fight was threatening to overshadow the party’s message as Trump tries to focus on the rising cost of living.
Speaker Mike Johnson called on the Senate to add more privacy protections for victims and whistleblowers, a concern Higgins cited in explaining his vote against the bill. But that would have required the bill to come back to the House for final approval.
Congress agreed to release the Epstein files
On Tuesday, all that scrutiny came to a head when both chambers of Congress overwhelmingly agreed to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill that would compel the Justice Department to release as much information as possible about federal investigations into Epstein. The legislation went immediately to the desk of the president after an abrupt about-face to support the measure despite initially opposing it.
The success of the measure was a remarkable show of bipartisan force. It also was the culmination of a rare rebuke from congressional Republicans of Trump, whose decades-old ties to Epstein have recently come back to haunt him.
It’s unclear how the Justice Department will immediately respond to the new bill, or what the timeline will be for the release of more information. But in the short term, the new bill represented a win for Epstein’s many victims, and potentially, a growing willingness among congressional Republicans to buck the president – at least on some issues.
The bill’s bipartisan authors – Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, D-California – have stressed that the legislation will not expose victims. It stipulates that the Justice Department is permitted to withhold certain information, such as personal details about victims and materials that would jeopardize any active federal investigations.
