House lawmakers gearing up to vote Tuesday on a bill that would force the Justice Department to release all its files relating to Jeffrey Epstein are pressuring the Senate to pass the measure without any amendments.
The legislation is coming to the House floor Tuesday afternoon via a mechanism called a discharge petition led by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. A discharge petition allows a bill to get a House-wide vote against leaders’ wishes, provided the petition gets support from most lawmakers in the chamber. In this case, the petition last week earned support from most lawmakers in the chamber, including from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
‘This has never been political. This is not about questions of Trump or Biden. This is a question of doing the right thing for survivors. We’re going to get a vote today. I expect an overwhelming vote in the House of Representatives. And I don’t want the DC swamp playing any games,’ Khanna said Tuesday as he appeared at a press conference alongside Massie, Greene and some of Epstein’s survivors.
‘They need to pass this in the Senate, and they should not amend it. President Trump has said he would sign the Epstein Transparency Act. It’s going to get overwhelming support in the House. It should go straight to the Senate, and it should be signed. No amendments, no adding loopholes. Justice is long overdue,’ he added.
Massie reiterated Khanna’s statements.
‘As Ro said, don’t muck it up in the Senate. Don’t get too cute,’ Massie warned the upper chamber. ‘We’re all paying attention. If you want to add some additional protections for these survivors, go for it. But if you do anything that prevents any disclosure, you are not for the people, and you are not part of this effort. Do not muck it up in the Senate.’
GOP lawmakers who spoke with Fox News Digital Monday evening said they would vote for the bill and were optimistic their colleagues would as well — though many of them said they still had concerns about how it was written.
It comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who had been against the bill but pushed parallel transparency efforts in Epstein’s case, said he hoped it would undergo material changes when it reached the Senate to give more protection for innocent people whose names may appear in the files against their wishes.
‘These women have fought the most horrific fight that no woman should have to fight, and they did it by banding together and never giving up,’ Greene said Tuesday. ‘And that’s what we did by fighting so hard against the most powerful people in the world, even the President of the United States, in order to make this vote happen today.’
‘I was called a traitor by a man that I fought for five, no, actually, six years for. And I gave him my loyalty for free. I won my first election without his endorsement, beating eight men in a primary, and I’ve never owed him anything. But I fought for him for the policies and for America First,’ Greene said, days after President Donald Trump pulled his endorsement of the Georgia Republican. ‘And he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition.’
‘Let me tell you what a traitor is,’ Greene added. ‘A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans, like the women standing behind me.’
‘And today, you are going to see probably a unanimous vote in the House to release the Epstein files. But the fight, the real fight will happen after that. While I want to see every single name released so that these women don’t have to live in fear and intimidation, which is something I’ve had a small taste of in just the past few days. Just a small taste,’ she added. ‘They’ve been living it for years, but the real test will be will the Department of Justice release the files, or will it all remain tied up in investigations?’
Khanna also called Tuesday the ‘first day of real reckoning for the Epstein class.’
‘We’re here to stand with forgotten and abandoned Americans against an Epstein class that had no regard for the rules or the laws,’ Khanna continued. ‘Because survivors spoke up, because of their courage, the truth is finally going to come out. And when it comes out, this country is really going to have a moral reckoning.’
‘How did we allow this to happen? There should be no buildings named after people in this Epstein class. There should be no scholarships named after them. They shouldn’t be enjoying the perks of being affiliated with corporations or universities, or writing op-eds or being lionized. And many of the survivors will tell you some of these people still are celebrated in our society. That’s disgusting. There needs to be accountability,’ he also said.
Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.