The US Congress approved this Tuesday a bill that gives the green light to the release of sex offender case documents Jeffrey Epstein.
First it was the House of Representatives which overwhelmingly supported the legislation which orders the Department of Justice to publish all documentation of the controversial case. And then the Senate sent it directly to Trump’s desk, without a new vote.
The resolution was approved in the House by 427 votes in favor and only one againsta margin so extraordinary that it led the Senate Republican leader, John Thune, to affirm that amending it in that legislative body was not a possibility.
Previously, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, had asked the plenary session for automatic sending to Trump and no one opposed, according to the EFE agency.
cnn He described the move as a “significant” step after months of internal tensions among Republicans, who until recently tried to block the measure.
Regarding the signing of the law, a senior official quoted by the network assured that “Trump will do it when he gets to the White House,” while EFE remember that the president assured that he was willing to sign the law as soon as it arrived at his office.
White House accuses Democrats of leaked Epstein emails “to smear Trump”
Trump and the Epstein case
The political turnaround has as its axis Donald Trump himself, whose government had systematically stopped the publication of the documents.
The president called the issue a “Democratic farce” and had pressured Republican leaders to prevent it from moving forward. However, pressure within his own party and fear of a parliamentary defeat led him to give in, according to analysis on the subject.
The opening maneuver is not only surprising because of the forcefulness of the vote, but also because of the previous resistance, according to cnn.
The American media revealed that House Speaker Mike Johnson spent months trying to “quell Washington’s obsession with Epstein’s files,” citing concerns for the victims’ privacy.
However, on Tuesday he backed the measure, as did most Republican leaders.
The only vote against, that of Congressman Clay Higgins, was based—as he himself explained in X—on the fact that the legislation could “reveal and harm thousands of innocent people.”
Pressure from the Republican Party
The promoter of the project, Thomas Massie, had been the target of personal attacks from Trump and his advisors, who even promoted the idea of finding him a rival in primaries.
Despite this, Massie celebrated the vote as “a moment that comes too late,” after having fought “against the president, the attorney general, the director of the FBI, the speaker of the House and the vice president” to gain support. Now, he said, “they are on our side.”
Tensions also reached Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, previously a close ally of Trump, whom the president even called a “traitor” for supporting the declassification.
Greene defended in statements collected by EFE that “the women who accompanied her are not victims, but survivors.” He also stated that they had fought “against the most powerful people in the world, even the president, to make this vote happen.”
The Democrats, for their part, took advantage of the opportunity to question Trump’s real intentions.
EFE quotes Congressman Pete Aguilar, who maintained that if Trump really wanted to release the files, “he could do it tomorrow,” alluding to what he considers political control over the Department of Justice.
According to the Spanish agency, the pressure to disclose the information intensified last week, when Democrats in the Lower House published 20,000 emails in which Epstein directly mentioned Trump.
In them, Epstein claimed that then-businessman Trump knew of his crimes and had spent “hours” with one of the victims.
The White House resists until the end
cnn details that the Government tried to block the initiative with calls to legislators and public warnings.
However, the maneuver was neutralized when Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna gathered the 218 signatures needed to force a vote through a discharge petition.
Now all that remains is the presidential signature for the Department of Justice to begin disclosure.
The victims, he points out EFEthey hope that this time the promise of transparency will be fulfilled.
“The real test will be whether the files are made public or if everything will remain blocked,” Greene warned.
