President Donald Trump on Monday said he’d sign the bipartisan bill forcing the Department of Justice to release case files from probes into dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein if the House and Senate pass it and send it to his desk.
Asked if he’d sign the bill known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act during an Oval Office event alongside FIFA president Gianni Infantino, an uncharacteristically hoarse Trump told reporters: “I do want to sign.”
Trump then launched into a tirade about how he has “nothing to do with” the once high-flying child sex offender, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, even though he was once routinely described as Epstein’s friend.
“We have nothing to do with Epstein. The Democrats do. All of his friends were Democrats,” Trump insisted. “You look at Larry Summers, Bill Clinton. They went to his island all the time, and many others, all Democrats.”
Trump then compared the ongoing furor over the FBI case files regarding Epstein to the public clamor for long-classified records about the assassinations of President John F Kennedy, Sen. Robert Kennedy, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and groused that “no matter what we give” in terms of releasing records, “it’s never enough.”
“No matter what we give, it's never enough. You know, with Kennedy, we gave everything, and it wasn't enough. With Martin Luther King, we gave everything, and it's never enough. We've already given. I believe the number is 50,000 pages, 50,000 pages, and it's just a Russia, Russia, Russia hoax as it pertains to the Republicans,” he claimed.
The Epstein files bill, which was sponsored by Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie and California Democrat Ro Khanna in the House, is expected to be voted on by the lower chamber on Tuesday after 218 members — all of the chamber’s 214 Democrats, plus Massie and fellow GOP members Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene — forced House Speaker Mike Johnson to schedule a vote by putting their signatures to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver called a discharge petition last week.
Johnson had kept the House out of session for over six weeks to prevent the swearing-in of Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva after she had vowed to be the final signature needed to force the vote but after she signed the petition following her swearing-in last week he scheduled the vote for Tuesday.
The bill would still need to pass the Senate in order to reach Trump’s desk. Majority Whip John Barrasso told NBC News on Sunday that it would face some resistance from his party in the upper chamber, and it’s unclear whether his stance has changed since then.
Trump and his closest advisers, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, had mounted a desperate effort to convince Boebert, Greene and Mace to withdraw their signatures from the discharge petition prior to Grijalva’s swearing-in, and Trump himself has raged privately for weeks about the continued clamor for more information about the FBI probe into Epstein’s crimes against children.
But after it became clear that the House was poised to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act with wide bipartisan support, he abruptly switched his position and urged the GOP to support the bill while simultaneously casting the entire matter as both a “hoax” when it comes to his ties to Epstein and an under-covered scandal with regard to Clinton and other Democrats even though Bondi and Patel have previously said there was not enough evidence in the files to support criminal cases against anyone except Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator, disgraced British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell.
Writing on Truth Social late Sunday, he said 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.”
He said the Department of Justice has already turned over “tens of thousands” related to Epstein and is now looking at “various Democrat operatives” mentioned in the documents, including former president Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman and Larry Summers.
He also said the House Oversight Committee “can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!”
“All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT” to celebrate what he has called his administration’s successes on the economy and “affordability.”
“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,” Trump wrote.
“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,” he added.
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