Nicole Lafond writing for Talking Points Memo:
By now you’ve maybe seen the news that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is, effectively, shutting down the House’s legislative work and sending everyone home early for August recess in order to block any House floor action on the release of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased convicted sex offender.
His rationale for all of this is two-fold. He says that after conversations with the White House and President Trump, he believes that lawmakers need to give the executive branch “space” to do the work they are already doing to release the files. This supposed work to make the documents public is only a few days old. Trump only directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into unsealing grand jury material in the case (a maneuver that will likely yield little) after a week of bad-for-Trump headlines — spurred by his own Justice Department’s decision to not release any more info to the public. A growing rift began to emerge last week not just among Trump’s MAGA base of conspiracy theorist influencers, but within the Republican Party as well.
At least 10 House Republicans had indicated they would join Democrats in supporting a bipartisan resolution sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), which calls for releasing a lot more from the Epstein investigative files than the Trump administration is currently looking into unsealing. Massie and Khanna planned to use a procedural move, a discharge petition, to compel a vote on the matter.
As is so often the case in 2025, it's important to remind ourselves just how bizarre these events are. The Democratic resistance has struck an extraordinary blow in the Republican-controlled House based on a scandal most of which was in the public record a decade ago.
It is also important to remember that without Elon Musk—or, more precisely, the Musk/Trump feud—none of this would have happened. Just to recap the events: Musk made a number of bitter enemies in the White House, sometimes leading to actual physical confrontations. When he left, one or more of those enemies dropped the dime on him with The New York Times and provided the paper with the photographs and videos behind their exposé. No one likes having their drug habits and weird family life exposed in the paper of record and, as mentioned before, Elon Musk is even more vindictive and driven by rage than Donald Trump. Musk used his powerful right-wing platform to pound the Epstein drum.
While Trump's long, close friendship with Epstein had been well known for years, Musk was able to get it on MAGA’s radar, which re-energized the scandal. Suddenly the story wasn't the president's creepy relationship with arguably the world's most famous pedophile; it was the base's reaction to that relationship.
Once the press, particularly The Wall Street Journal, got going on this one, it was inevitable that damaging revelations would start gushing forth. The Wall Street Journal started things with the story that prompted the lawsuit from Trump. The New York Times, in catch-up mode, rushed forward with their own story a couple of days later, followed by one where CNN dug through old unaired footage and photos and uncovered a wealth of material. This was followed by the WSJ coming out with yet another story, this time revealing that Trump had been lying when claiming that Bondi never told him he was in the Epstein files.
I'm not going to speculate on how long this will continue other than to say I suspect we still have at least a little ways to go. I'm certainly not going to hazard a guess as to what impact this will have on the midterms and beyond. The situation is complicated, and we have no real precedent to guide us. I will say, however, that those who dismissed the Trump/Musk feud and the re-emergence of the scandal as sensationalistic distractions probably need to rethink some of their assumptions.
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