Rep. Thomas Massie announced Tuesday he’d kickstart a long-shot procedural maneuver to force a vote on releasing Jeffrey Epstein-related files.
The Kentucky Republican, alongside Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), is launching a so-called discharge petition to bypass leadership and allow a floor vote on the release of the materials — provided the petition gets the 218 lawmaker signatures.
“We all deserve to know what’s in the Epstein files, who’s implicated, and how deep this corruption goes,” Massie wrote on X. “Americans were promised justice and transparency.”
The discharge petition gambit is rarely successful, with many majority-party members hesitant to buck their own leaders even if they support the underlying premise. But Republicans have been roiled by divisions over the Trump administration’s handling of the investigation into Epstein, the disgraced financier who died in jail after being charged with sex trafficking.
Some Republicans like Massie have called for more disclosure from the administration after the Justice Department said there was no evidence Epstein had a “client list” or that he was murdered, despite suggestion from President Donald Trump and his allies during the 2024 campaign that they believed such information was being hidden from the public. Democrats, in turn, have needled the GOP over the controversy and attempted to turn a procedural vote Tuesday into a referendum on releasing more Epstein files.
