House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would vote in support of releasing the Epstein files on Tuesday after ongoing attempts to avoid even holding the vote failed.
The speaker’s “yes” vote comes after President Donald Trump reversed course over the weekend and said he supported Republicans voting for the bill after desperately trying to block it for months.
Johnson himself only scheduled a vote on the bill to release the full files after the discharge petition received the necessary 218 signatures to force a vote, months after the bipartisan bill was introduced.
The Speaker was clear on Tuesday that he still did not support the discharge petition as it stood and had various concerns.
However, he sidestepped a question when asked point-blank if his “yes” vote was because Trump told Republicans to support it.
“If and when the discharge reached the 218th signature, it’d be forced, and the forcing mechanism here prevents the very deliberate, professional, careful manner in which Congress is supposed to do this,” Johnson responded. “I lament that. That’s why I’ve been opposed to it all along.”
However, he claimed with the forced vote, “none of us want to go on record and in any way be accused of not being for maximum transparency.”
Johnson said the only way to avoid such accusations was for lawmakers to “vote their conscience” and go on record and say they’re for maximum transparency.
The Speaker said there was a group of Republicans like him who had been struggling over whether they could vote yes.
Among his list of “dangers” were claims it did not do enough to protect the victims. He also warned innocent people who faced false claims could also be swept up in it if all the files were released.
Johnson noted it’s not guaranteed that the issues in the bill will be fixed in the Senate, but he was voting for it anyway.
He also slammed Democrats and accused them of focusing on Epstein to attack Trump, with whom he has remained in lock-step since the president returned to office.
The forced vote in the House comes months after the Trump administration said in a memo it would not release any more files, causing widespread outrage after the president said on the campaign trail that he would.
Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act over the Summer, but it was not brought to the floor for a vote.
In September, they started collecting signatures for the discharge petition to force the vote. It finally received its 218th vote last week once Rep. Adelita Grijalva was sworn in.
On Tuesday, the Speaker insisted that holding the vote was not a U-turn for him despite the fact that he could have put the bill on the floor months ago.
“It’s not a reversal,” he argued. “We had big problems with the discharge from the moment it was filed. We talked with the authors. There were lots of people that went and pleaded with them to fix it so that everybody could be together.”
He kept insisting that Republicans had always been for “maximum transparency.” Now, forcing the vote had tied his hands.
“What am I to do as a leader in a situation like this? I called my counterpart in the Senate, Leader Thune, and I talked through this with him and shared our deep concerns, and of course they share those concerns as well,” Johnson said during his press conference.
The speaker claimed he was confident when the petition moved forward and went to the Senate, if the chamber even took it up, they would amend it to address concerns that he claimed he could not fix in the House.
However, Johnson also argued that even while he was voting for the bill, he still was backing the House Oversight Committee’s investigation. He said that was the appropriate place for the work.
It has released some 50,000 files and continues to go through others.
While the speaker raised concerns that the bill does not adequately protect the identities of victims, its sponsors have pushed back that the legislation does allow for names and identifying information to be redacted.
A group of Epstein’s survivors held a press conference alongside Khanna and Massie on Tuesday where they called for the bill to pass in the House and Senate. They were also meeting with lawmakers on the hill ahead of the vote.
Massie also fired back at Johnson for his criticism that the bill was flawed in a post with an image of Johnson’s press conference on Tuesday. He highlighted one of the items on the speaker’s list of concerns that the bill risked disclosing non-credible allegations.
The Kentucky lawmaker accused Johnson of planning to “protect perverts who went to the rape island from embarrassment” and said the bill should not be amended in the Senate to “avoid disclosing those rich and powerful men who have evaded justice for so many years.”
