US President Donald Trump scrambled as his aides and allies failed to stop a bipartisan push to force House disclosure of Jeffrey Epstein files, leaving the President publicly rebuked and privately exposed.
The President and senior White House officials spent the day urging House Republicans to withdraw support for a discharge petition that suddenly reached the 218 signatures needed to force a floor vote.
Hours after Democrats released three private emails from Jeffrey Epstein that referenced Trump, Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva was sworn in and added the decisive signature, dooming the White House effort to head off the vote. The spectacle, including a high-security meeting with Rep. Lauren Boebert and a flurry of Truth Social posts, left the administration appearing defensive and politically vulnerable.
The White House's Last-Minute Push
White House officials convened a private meeting with Rep. Lauren Boebert in an attempt to persuade her to remove her name from the discharge petition, a move the administration framed as routine outreach but which critics called extraordinary interference.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the meeting as evidence of transparency, telling reporters that the administration was willing to 'sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns'.
Yet the optics of bringing a key lawmaker into the Situation Room, a space reserved for national security briefings, fuelled accusations that the White House was trying to use its powers to protect the President.
The intervention failed. Within hours, Grijalva was sworn in and signed the petition that will force the House to vote on releasing unclassified Department of Justice records related to Epstein's prosecution.
The move gave the petition the 218 signatures it needed and made a floor vote inevitable, effectively humiliating an administration that had spent the day trying to head it off. Republican leaders, who had delayed Grijalva's swearing-in for weeks during the shutdown standoff, could not prevent the outcome once normal House business resumed.
New Documents, Renewed Pressure
The immediate cause of the scramble was the release by House Democrats of three private email exchanges from Jeffrey Epstein's estate that referenced Trump, including one exchange in which Epstein wrote that a woman had 'spent hours at my house' with Trump and another that said Trump 'knew about the girls'.
Those messages were swiftly amplified by Democratic calls for full transparency and by victims' advocates demanding the release of the broader 'Epstein files'. The Oversight Committee then released some 20,000 additional pages from Epstein's estate, while Republican members countered with their own tranche of documents, accusing Democrats of cherry-picking.
Trump's public response came in a series of posts on Truth Social, in which he dismissed the disclosures as a Democratic 'hoax' intended to deflect attention from the government shutdown, and urged House Republicans to focus on reopening government.
That line, portraying the controversy as partisan theatre rather than a matter of public scrutiny, did not blunt the political damage. Multiple outlets reported that senior aides and Justice Department officials had actively lobbied members of Congress to dampen support for the discharge petition.
The result was an image of a presidency on the defensive, using the instruments of power to shepherd sympathetic lawmakers away from a transparency drive that directly affected the President.
Why This Matters Politically
A forced House vote will compel every member to go on record about whether the government should disclose more files connected to a sprawling scandal that has intersected with political elites for years.
For Trump, the danger is obvious. Even if the material does not prove criminal conduct, the resurfacing of detailed contemporaneous memoranda and correspondence will keep allegations and unanswered questions in the headlines during an already bruising political season. For Republicans, the vote presents a fraught choice between loyalty to a President and the growing bipartisan appetite for transparency in high-profile investigations.
Speaker Mike Johnson has said the full House will vote next week on whether to force the release of additional files, setting up a moment of high political theatre that could reverberate beyond the Capitol. The outcome will depend on a handful of House Republicans prepared to buck party leadership; their choices may determine not only the fate of these documents but the immediate political trajectory of a presidency already under strain.
The day's events left the White House exposed and the President politically bruised. An administration that spent the morning trying to halt a vote ended the day unable to prevent it, a reversal that will haunt the coming week.
