WASHINGTON — Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., the conservative firebrand who's clashed with Donald Trump and other GOP leaders, filed a discharge petition Tuesday to force a floor vote compelling the Justice Department to release all the files from the Jeffrey Epstein case.
It's one of the first House actions as lawmakers return to Washington from their five-week summer recess. And the issue is sure to dominate Capitol Hill this week, as sexual abuse survivors of Epstein — the convicted sex offender who took his own life in prison in 2019 — met with key lawmakers Tuesday and plan to hold a much-anticipated news conference Wednesday.
Massie and his Democratic co-author, Rep. Ro Khanna of California, said they will begin collecting signatures for their Epstein resolution starting Tuesday. They need at least 218 signatures — half the members of the House — to force a vote, and Khanna told NBC News he is certain that all 212 Democrats will sign on, along with at least six Republicans.
If they can secure the requisite 218 signatures, there is still an additional waiting period of seven legislative days before a vote can happen. Then the House speaker has two legislative days before he must call up the measure for a vote on the floor. So, the earliest a final vote could happen would be in two weeks.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and other GOP leaders are opposed to the push, arguing that it’s not needed because the House Oversight Committee is investigating the matter and is in the process of reviewing a tranche of Epstein records.
But the discharge petition allows a majority of the House to circumvent leadership's wishes.
A White House official commented on the discharge petition Tuesday night, saying that supporting it would be viewed as “a hostile act.”
“Helping Thomas Massie and Liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee, would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration,” the official said in an email to NBC News.
Trying to release the building pressure on Epstein, GOP leaders on Tuesday added their own Epstein-related bill to the list of legislation the House will tackle this week.
But the bill has little teeth: It would direct the Oversight Committee to “continue its ongoing investigation into the possible mismanagement of the Federal government’s investigation of Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell” — something the panel is already doing.
"@SpeakerJohnson just scheduled this meaningless vote to provide political cover for those members who don’t support our bipartisan legislation to force the release of the Epstein files," Massie wrote on X.
Johnson, speaking to reporters in the Capitol, shot back at Massie: “I would describe virtually everything Thomas Massie says related to this issue as meaningless."
The bipartisan discharge push coincides with a group of survivors from the Epstein case traveling to Capitol Hill for both public and private events. On Tuesday afternoon, survivors met with a bipartisan group of Oversight Committee members behind closed doors. Speaker Johnson joined that two-hour-plus meeting, commending the "bravest women I've ever met" and calling the gathering both "heartbreaking and infuriating that justice has been delayed so long."
The Massie discharge petition, he said, was "inartfully drafted" and he warned that it would not protect the identities of victims.
"We have two ultimate objectives here. We want to bring justice to every single person who is involved in the Epstein evils of the cover-up. But we also want to be equally certain that we protect the innocent victims," Johnson told reporters after the meeting. "Many of these young women, some of them are now middle-aged women, have never come forward. We do not want their names or identities to be uncovered carelessly or intentionally in any way."
Johnson added, "We want to encourage whistleblowers in an investigation like this, and there are standards and practices and procedures that are used in federal prosecutions and investigations and here in Congress that are not adequately stated in the discharge petition."
Johnson also called the petition "effectively a moot point now because all of this is happening. What the House Oversight Committee is doing, what they’re actually gathering, is everything that was requested in the discharge petition plus even more."
On Wednesday morning, another group of survivors will appear at a news conference hosted by Massie and Khanna.
Massie said in a separate post on X that 10 survivors will join the press conference and that some have never spoken publicly before. Khanna said the revelations from the survivors will be “explosive.”
Though Congress was not in session in August, the House Oversight Committee continued its work on the Epstein investigation over the recess. It brought in several key witnesses for closed-door deposition, including former Attorney General William Barr. It has also issued subpoenas to former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Robert Mueller, Jeff Sessions and Alberto Gonzales.
Sessions, Gonzalez and Holder all swore affidavits saying they had no knowledge of the Epstein affair in exchange for not appearing. Mueller will not appear because of health issues.
The committee has also scheduled a transcribed interview with former U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, whose office oversaw the Epstein case and reached a secret nonprosecution agreement with him in 2008. The panel also subpoenaed Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, for a deposition.
The committee has also received hundreds of documents from the Justice Department related to the case and is expecting more. And it has subpoenaed the Epstein estate for documents; the estate is expected to answer the subpoena as early as this week.
Among the documents in the possession of the estate is Epstein's “birthday book,” to which, The Wall Street Journal reported, Trump contributed an explicit message. Trump has denied authoring the message and sued the Journal. NBC News has not independently verified or seen the book.
