Trump says House Republicans should vote to release Epstein files in stunning reversal: ‘Nothing to hide’
President Trump said Sunday that House Republicans should vote to release any and all files related to late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — after previously trying to dissuade the GOP from backing a measure that would force just that outcome.
“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 Sunday evening.
The House is expected to vote Tuesday on legislation that would compel the Justice Department to make public all materials related to the notorious case. The vote will happen despite the opposition of GOP leadership after a so-called “discharge petition” received the required 218 votes last week.
The legislation must also pass the Senate and be signed by Trump himself.
The president gave no indication Sunday night whether he would instruct Senate Republicans to approve the bill or that he would sign it
On Wednesday of last week, the House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 pages of documents provided by Epstein’s estate.
In the emails, Epstein — who was found dead on Aug. 10, 2019, in his Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges — insisted that Trump was fully aware of his practice of grooming and sexually abusing girls as young as 14.
“[O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked [G]hislaine to stop,” Epstein told discredited author Michael Wolff in a Jan. 31, 2019, email — referring to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s practice of recruiting victims from the spa at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
The following day, Epstein wrote in an email to himself that while “Trump knew of it. and came to my house many times during that period,” the future commander-in-chief “never got a massage.”
Trump and Epstein enjoyed a close friendship in the 1990s and early part of the 2000s, before reportedly falling out amid a bidding war over the purchase of a since-demolished Palm Beach, Fla. mansion.
The president announced Friday that he would ask the Department of Justice and FBI to investigate the financier’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 US Attorney Jay Clayton to take the lead in that probe.
“[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!”
