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House Speaker Mike Johnson and Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie reportedly clashed on Wednesday during a closed-door meeting for Republicans, as the Speaker urged members not to support Massie’s bill to force the Trump administration to release the Epstein files.
The House leader instead urged his fellow GOP members to back the House Oversight Committee’s Epstein investigation, CNN reports, which on Tuesday released tens of thousands of files it subpoenaed from the Justice Department. Critics of that effort said most of the files were already public.
In response to Johnson, Massie reportedly told members the attacks on his efforts from Johnson were false, and that the effort to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act was necessary because the Justice Department couldn’t be trusted to release all the Epstein files of its own accord, per Politico and The Hill.
In comments after the conference meeting, Johnson said he backed the committee effort over the “irrelevant and unnecessary” disclosure bill because it went in even further depth into Epstein’s history, including a “treasure trove” of information from the Epstein estate. The Speaker added that the president supports the committee’s goal of transparency.
“The White House is in full compliance, he said. “The administration is willfully compliant with the subpoenas because they want maximum transparency as well. I talked to the president himself last night about this. He said, ‘Get it out there.’”
An official with Massie’s office told The Independent the reported accounts of the clash with Johnson were accurate.
The reported clashes behind doors came the same day as the party’s divisions over the Epstein saga reached their most public form yet, with survivors of Epstein’s abuses gathered at the Capitol to share their experiences and support Massie’s bipartisan effort with California’s Rep. Ro Khanna to force a vote on a bill demanding the DOJ release all its Epstein materials.
Assuming Democrats back the measure, Massie and Khanna say they need two GOP defections to reach the majority of members required to force a vote on the bill through a procedural maneuver known as a discharge petition.
Donald Trump, whose administration promised far-reaching releases of Epstein files only to declare in July no further investigations or releases were warranted, told The Independent on Wednesday the Epstein saga was a “Democrat hoax.”
“From what I understand, thousands of pages of documents have been given,” Trump said in the Oval Office in answer to a question from The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg. “But it’s really a Democrat hoax, because they’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been President,” Trump said.”
Neither the House investigation nor Donald Trump’s dismissals of the Epstein scandal have quieted members and voters in both parties calling for more information to be released about the late financier, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting a federal sex trafficking trial.
The issue has been a rare vulnerability for Trump, a longtime former friend of Epstein whose campaign used an insurgent anti-establishment style, only to now face allegations the same federal law enforcement agencies he has long criticized are now closing ranks to protect him.
The administration’s interviews with convicted Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, which coincided with her recent move to a minimal-security federal prison in Texas, have only further inflamed the issue.
