Tensions over the release of documents related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein have complicated House Republicans’ plans to hold a vote on Thursday on legislation demanded by Donald Trump to cancel $9bn in government spending.
The House of Representatives faces a Friday deadline to pass the rescissions package demanded by Trump and approved by the Senate in the wee hours of Thursday morning, otherwise the administration will be obligated to spend about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs, and $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS.
But before the House can vote on the package, it must be approved by the rules committee, where the Democratic minority has sought to capitalize on a growing furor among Republicans and their supporters over the Trump administration’s handling of documents related to the Epstein case by forcing the majority to take politically tricky votes.
After several hours of delay, the committee announced it would hold a hearing into the package on Thursday evening, setting the stage for House Republicans to pass the legislation later in the night.
Ranking member Jim McGovern accused the GOP of “stalling” the rules committee hearing, and said Democrats would propose an amendment to the rescissions package meant to win release of any files related to Epstein.
“They’re afraid to meet again to have another vote. Well, we’re going to keep the heat on and you need to keep the pressure on members of Congress,” McGovern said. “Release the files. Full transparency.”
On Monday, rules committee Democrats made two attempts to add language to a cryptocurrency bill that would have required the release of documents dealing with the financier, who was accused of running a sex-trafficking ring catering to global elites. Republicans voted both down.
The Epstein case has grown into a crisis for Trump and the GOP ever since the justice department announced last week that, after a review of US government files, it had determined the financier’s 2019 death in federal custody was a suicide, and that no list of his clients existed to be made public.
Trump’s Maga coalition includes believers in a conspiracy theory that the “deep state” is covering up a global pedophile ring in which Epstein was a major figure, and that files exist to prove it. The president has strenuously denied that his administration is hiding anything, and insulted those who call for the documents’ release as “weaklings” who fell for a “radical left” hoax intended to discredit him.
Democrats, relegated to the minority in both chamber of Congress, have seized on that tension with an array of legislative maneuvers intended to make public any Epstein-related documents. On Tuesday, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, told a conservative podcaster who asked about the case: “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.”
Meanwhile, Thomas Massie, an iconoclastic Republican congressman who has repeatedly clashed with Trump, and the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna are trying to get a majority of the House to sign on to a petition that will force a vote on releasing the files, and has already received signatures from nine GOP lawmakers.
The rescissions passage passed the House in June, but the chamber must vote on it again after the Senate declined to cut funding for Pepfar, a program credited with saving millions of people from infection or death from HIV that was created in 2003 under the Republican president George W Bush.
