The Republican-controlled US Congress on Tuesday voted almost unanimously to force the release of US Department of Justice files on the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, an outcome US President Donald Trump had fought for months before ending his opposition.
Two days after Trump’s abrupt about-face, the US House of Representatives passed the measure with a vote of 427-1, sending a resolution requiring the release of all unclassified records on Epstein to the Republican-majority US Senate, which swiftly approved it.
Trump plans to sign the bill when it reaches his desk, a senior White House official said.
Photo: EPA
The Epstein scandal has been a political thorn in Trump’s side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. Many Trump voters believe his administration has covered up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death, which was ruled a suicide, in a Manhattan jail in 2019.
Epstein was a New York financier who fraternized with some of the most powerful men in the country, including former US secretary of the treasury Larry Summers, who resigned from the OpenAI board yesterday after Congress released documents showing he shared a close relationship with Epstein.
Before the House vote, about two dozen survivors of Epstein’s alleged abuse joined a trio of Democratic and Republican lawmakers outside the US Capitol to urge the release of the records. The women held photographs of their younger selves, the age at which they said they first encountered Epstein.
After the vote, they stood to applaud lawmakers from the House’s public gallery, some of them crying and hugging each other.
“We are exhausted from surviving the trauma and then surviving the politics that swirl around it,” one of the survivors said.
Another, Jena-Lisa Jones, said she had voted for Trump and had a message for the president: “I beg you Donald Trump, please stop making this political.”
Despite his changed position on the bill, Trump remains angry about the attention paid to the Epstein matter.
“I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein,” the Republican president told reporters while hosting a visit by Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. “I threw him out of my club many years ago, because I thought he was a sick pervert.”
Additional reporting by AP
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