Inside his cavernous office on Monday afternoon, Speaker Mike Johnson was facing a growing crisis. The House GOP conference, which included some of the Louisiana Republican’s key allies, was in full rebellion over the spiraling Jeffrey Epstein situation.
Rules Committee Chair Virginia Foxx of North Carolina and panel member Erin Houchin of Indiana informed House leaders that Republicans on the panel would not advance any rule for the week — the prerequisite for the chamber to fully function — without a better solution to the Epstein problem, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversation.
The lawmakers knew that bucking their own leadership was an extreme response. But panel Republicans were incensed that a week earlier, they were all but forced to vote against a Democratic effort calling for the release of Epstein-related information. Many, including Houchin, were under intense pressure from constituents to support the unsealing, and they wanted leaders to provide more political cover.
Hours later, Johnson and senior Republicans decided to shut down the Rules Committee altogether, which meant forgoing votes on two key immigration bills before lawmakers left for the month-long August recess. After some back and forth, leaders also scrapped votes scheduled for Thursday and sent members home a day early. The speaker later defended his strategy, saying House Republicans were refusing to play Democrats’ “political games” over the deceased financier and convicted sex offender.
One Rules Committee Republican, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, suggested Johnson had bought himself some time — for now.
“I think the administration will put more stuff out in August. … If they don’t, then I promise you, there’s going to be some more looking at this in the first week of September,” he warned.
This account of the House breakdown is based on interviews this week with more than a dozen lawmakers and aides who described a level of anger within the conference that went beyond even what was on display publicly. Behind closed doors, standoffs played out between GOP leaders and rank-and-file members who found themselves divided over being forced to take more Epstein-related votes.
The revolt of House Republicans who favored releasing Epstein case documents surprised White House officials and multiple members of GOP leadership. Trump officials in particular, who are used to House Republicans rolling over to the president’s every whim, were especially stunned at the increasingly public and blunt pushback.
But some senior GOP aides privately acknowledged they could see Epstein-fueled pressure brewing into a bigger and bigger problem. They could tell how sensitive the issue was for the White House after Johnson appeared to break with President Donald Trump over the matter by calling for full transparency from the DOJ on a conservative podcast, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The White House fumed over the perceived off-script moment, with Johnson going on to say days later there was “no daylight” between House Republicans and Trump.
The speaker kept in close touch with the president as the crisis unfolded, according to the people, and has since worked diligently to keep Epstein-related votes at bay. But Johnson’s efforts to preach party unity and presidential deference on the matter ran up against an outcry from within his conference.
Dozens of House Republicans had spent years clamoring for this information to be made public, and feared they would be called hypocrites if they backed down now, following Attorney General Pam Bondi’s announcement there would be no more documents released.
House Republican leaders received a series of warnings from members in closed-door meetings and in conversations on the House floor, including from committee chairs, that the problem wasn’t going away. Some of these lawmakers begged leadership for action, according to the people with knowledge of the private exchanges.
House Oversight Chair James Comer said he told leadership last week that if certain Epstein-related votes came up in his committee, his GOP majority would vote for it — and they did. First, on Tuesday, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) forced a vote on a motion to subpoena Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell; then, on Wednesday, three Republicans joined onto a Democratic motion to subpoena the entire Epstein dossier from the Justice Department.
“My committee has been wanting to do this for several weeks now,” Comer said earlier in the week. “I told leadership last week if there’s ever an opportunity … to do anything realistically with the Epstein stuff, a majority of the committee’s gonna vote for it.”
Leaders had already canceled an appropriations subcommittee markup slated for Thursday due to expected absences, but also Democrats had been planning to try to force votes on dozens of Epstein-related amendments there, too, according to a person granted anonymity to share party strategy.
On Wednesday, Johnson strongly defended his handling of the crisis, telling reporters “no one in Congress is blocking Epstein documents.”
But days earlier, there were Republican members of the Rules Committee telling Johnson there was a major problem.
Concern rose just before a committee meeting scheduled for Monday afternoon, when word got out that Democrats would again force an Epstein-related vote as the panel sought to pave the way for floor consideration of underlying bills, including immigration legislation central to the GOP agenda.
Most Rules Republicans quickly balked, and the committee recessed indefinitely to figure out next steps.
Shortly after 6 p.m., Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and other GOP leaders huddled with the GOP Rules members in Majority Whip Tom Emmer’s office. Inside the room, Johnson and his team laid out several options, according to three people with direct knowledge of the meeting.
One option, of which Johnson appeared to be most supportive, was to forgo moving legislation through the Rules Committee for the rest of the week — effectively a legislative surrender, but it would give the White House time over August recess to work on releasing Epstein-related information.
Another route was to vote on a rule that included some of the Epstein language from the GOP-authored, non-binding resolution from the previous week, which would call for the release of a limited scope of Epstein documents. But GOP leaders believed that would likely fail on the chamber floor.
Then there was the alternative that some House Republicans bristled at the most: to forge ahead in the Rules Committee and to vote “no” on Democratic-led Epstein amendments. But that also wouldn’t have satisfied Republicans who wanted leaders to come up with a palatable alternative to support like the nonbinding resolution.
“The rule was going down anyway,” said another person with knowledge of the matter. “So the choice was clear.”
So Republicans picked door No. 1, a choice that has opened Johnson up to mockery on the Democratic side of the aisle and incredulity inside his conference.
“People want the information. They don’t want things covered up,” GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders in the House, told reporters this week.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise in an interview Wednesday played off the crisis, saying that the fallout wasn’t a “rebellion” but rather Democrats trying to “turn the Rules Committee into a circus” and Republicans “weren’t going to let that happen.”
But Senior House Republicans have also been irritated that the White House hadn’t offered much in terms of backup, according to two other Republicans with knowledge of the conversations. When there is a problem in the House GOP conference, leaders often call in Trump to mediate.
Trump did speak to Rules Committee Republicans — who were at the center of the protest over Epstein this week — in the Oval Office Tuesday night, according to three people with direct knowledge of the meeting. Foxx, the Rules chair, said the meeting was to thank panel Republicans for their work to pass Trump’s megabill ahead of a White House celebration around the legislative achievement.
But Rules Committee Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina — who this week accused House GOP leaders this week of “stalling” on Epstein matters — said he believes Trump now “is gonna release everything.”
“We were with him last night,” Norman added.
Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have been pushing for a vote on a binding Epstein file-release measure that could have the support to pass the house in September, when the bipartisan duo will be able to use procedural maneuvers to force the issue. GOP leaders privately argue their best chance to defeat it is for the administration to make progress in August — an outcome Norman and others are rooting for, too.
In the meantime, the firestorm doesn’t appear to be dying down, especially following a Wall Street Journal report that the Justice Department informed Trump in May that his name was in documents related to the Epstein case.
“That is our best, and only, option now,” one senior House Republican said. “Otherwise, we’ll be right back here in September.”
Nicholas Wu and Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.
Read the full article here