Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday he doesn’t believe a bipartisan effort to force a House vote compelling the release of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents will succeed.
Asked about the discharge petition led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Johnson said he doubted they would convince enough Republicans to sign on.
Massie and three other GOP members have so far signed; at least two more House Republicans would be needed in order to end-run Johnson and force a vote on requiring the Justice Department to release its entire file on the disgraced sex trafficker.
“I don’t expect he will,” Johnson said when asked about Massie’s chances of success.
White House officials are running an intense pressure campaign to keep Republicans from joining the discharge effort. Trump aides have made calls to GOP members who have co-sponsored the Massie-Khanna measure, pressuring those who haven’t signed to keep their names off the discharge petition and those who have to remove their names, according to three Republicans granted anonymity to discuss the conversations.
“They’re using everything they got. Jim Braid is calling …. Jeff Freeland is calling, James Blair is calling. In some cases, president is talking to people,” Massie said in an interview Thursday morning on the administration’s pressure campaign to peel away House GOP support. Braid is the White House director of legislative affairs, while Freeland is the House liaison and Blair is deputy chief of staff.
Johnson said in a separate interview Thursday that Massie’s effort is “superfluous” after Republicans approved a leadership-blessed measure encouraging the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to continue its pending Epstein probe.
That vote is symbolic in nature and was put forward by GOP leaders as a way to head off Massie’s binding effort.
Johnson also said he suspected President Donald Trump will “probably” meet with Epstein’s victims, some of whom came to Capitol Hill Wednesday to appear with Massie and Khanna.
Massie, meanwhile, said he believed that the necessary 218 signers were within reach. He declined to say who the additional two supporters would be, explaining that he made a “tactical error” in revealing earlier in the process that his goal was to get 12 cosponsors and thereby “gave the White House a roadmap of who to torment.”
He told reporters he suspected it would take an additional week or two of lobbying his colleagues, as Republicans sift through the first batch of nearly 33,000 files DOJ handed over as part of House Oversight’s Epstein investigation and discover “there’s almost nothing new in there, and everything that’s interesting is redacted.”
But other Republicans echoed Johnson’s concerns with the underlying Massie bill, which would require the Department of Justice to turn over the Epstein Files in 30 days with limited redactions. Rep. Tim Burchett, for one, met with the Epstein accusers earlier this week and said in a brief interview that he was “afraid in our rush to [release the files] we might damage some of those ladies.”
Rep. Eric Burlison, a member of House Oversight, said there may be a point at which Massie’s petition provides a useful political tool, if the Justice Department drags its feet on handing over new information. But the Oversight panel was already making significant progress, he said.
Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.
