Welcome to The Logoff: After months of resistance by the Trump administration, the “Epstein files” are set to be released to the public.
What happened? On Tuesday, Congress voted overwhelmingly to compel Donald Trump’s Justice Department to release files relating to deceased financier and onetime Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein. Trump, despite previous opposition, has said he will sign the bill into law.
What’s the context? The near-unanimous support in Congress belies the reality that Trump and his political allies really did not want this vote to happen; they just ran out of ways to put it off. Enough members of the House (largely Democrats, joined by a small handful of Republicans) signed a discharge petition, a congressional procedure to force a vote.
Trump threw his support behind the bill at the last minute on Sunday, after it became clear it would pass — and only after mounting a failed full-court press to prevent it from coming up for a vote in the first place.
What do we expect to learn? We don’t really know, though as my colleague Andrew Prokop reports, the DOJ has explicitly denied the existence of some documents, including an alleged Epstein “client list.” There is a lot there, though: the full files reportedly include more than 100,000 pages of materials.
The House bill sets a 30-day timeline for the release, in a “searchable and downloadable format,” of all unclassified materials connected to Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, though some materials may be withheld or redacted.
Why does this matter? Whatever we learn in the Epstein files, it’s not likely to blow the case wide open; Trump’s presidency won’t finally collapse under the weight of one scandal too many. But that doesn’t make it meaningless, either. At the very least, it’s another blow to an administration already on its back foot, and it’s a notable break in Trump’s usually iron grip over his party in Congress.
