BURSTThe sponsor of the discharge petition seeking to publicize all the government files on Jeffrey Epstein said Tuesday that he’s confident the motion will secure enough signatures to force a vote on his bill.
“I'm not really engaged in a massive whipping effort. I just assume we'll get the votes,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told reporters in the Capitol.
Hours earlier, Massie had introduced a discharge petition designed to force a floor vote on legislation requiring the Justice Department (DOJ) to release virtually all of its files on the Epstein case. As of Tuesday night, four Republicans had signed the petition: Massie, Nancy Mace (S.C.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.).
To hit the magic number of 218, two more Republicans would have to endorse the measure, assuming all 212 Democrats sign on, as expected.
Massie’s confident prediction came as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and other GOP leaders are hoping to defuse the GOP outcry over the Epstein case — and to discourage Republican lawmakers from endorsing Massie’s petition.
With that in mind, Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday evening released a large number of documents and videos delivered by the DOJ under subpoena from the panel.
Democrats on the committee have dismissed that effort, arguing that virtually all of that material had been made public previously. And Massie offered a similar assessment, saying the documents he’s seen from that trove “were just completely redacted pages.”
“The DOJ's curating all of that, and they're releasing what they want to release. And I think it's going to be like the binders that Attorney General [Pam] Bondi released [earlier in the year],” he said.
“People are going to go through them and say, 'Hey, wait. There's nothing new here. This is stuff we already knew.' And then that will only incite people to be more upset that there's no transparency.”
There are 12 Republican co-sponsors of Massie’s underlying bill to force the DOJ disclosures, which is sponsored with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). It’s unclear, however, how many of those GOP lawmakers are willing to take the longer step in bucking President Trump by signing the discharge petition.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), for instance, has co-sponsored the Massie-Khanna bill but is rejecting the discharge petition, citing a concern that it could lead to sloppy disclosures that could harm people who were connected to Epstein but did nothing wrong.
“There are good people that can be hurt, and we also have to protect the victims. So it should go through committee in a more careful and thoughtful way,” Van Drew said. “I'm not going to sign the discharge petition, but I do support the bill. And that's where I've been from the beginning.”
To promote their effort, Massie and Khanna are staging a press conference Wednesday morning at the Capitol with some of Epstein’s victims. Johnson and members of the Oversight Committee had also met with Epstein survivors on Tuesday, but it was done behind closed doors. Wednesday’s event, by contrast, will be public.
Massie said the difference is significant in dispelling the idea, advanced by Trump, that the Epstein saga is a “hoax.”
“I do think the game-changer here is the survivors speaking tomorrow. Because although I wasn't in the meeting that they had in the Oversight Committee, I heard it was very emotional,” Massie said.
“When they say those things publicly, there's no way you can call this a hoax.”