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Yesterday the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This measure gives the Department of Justice 30 days to release the files the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected when investigating the late sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The vote was 427 to 1, with Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA) casting the only nay vote. After the vote, Epstein survivors in the galleries cheered.
The strong vote in favor came after President Donald J. Trump, who had tried to kill the release of the Epstein files for months, on Sunday night suddenly reversed course. After failing to stop dozens of House Republicans from giving their support to the measure, he said he didn’t care if it passed, starting a stampede of Republicans eager to be on the popular side of the issue.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) evidently went along with this strategy because he expected Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) to stall the measure with amendments. If it finally passed nonetheless, the House would have to take it up again and could delay it further. After the House passed the bill, Johnson told reporters he would “insist upon” amendments.
But Thune was not inclined to play along. Johnson has been openly doing Trump’s bidding and jamming the Senate to force it to comply, and Thune appears to have had enough. Before the measure went to the Senate, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer asked for unanimous consent to pass the measure when it arrived. The Senate agreed, and thus the bill passed the Senate automatically by a unanimous vote in favor.
On social media, Just Jack posted: “Anytime you’re feeling embarrassed, remember that Clay Higgins woke up this morning to the realization he was the only one in the whole *ss Congress who voted to defend pedophiles.”
Mike Johnson did not take the news of the Senate passage particularly well, telling MS NOW congressional reporter Mychael Schnell: “I am deeply disappointed in this outcome…. It needed amendments. I just spoke to the president about that. We’ll see what happens.” Johnson said both he and the president “have concerns” about the bill.
Trump seemed to sense last night that the jig was up. “I don’t care when the Senate passes the House Bill,” he wrote in the early evening. “Whether tonight, or at some other time in the near future, I just don’t want Republicans to take their eyes off all the Victories that we’ve had….” He went on to record his usual list of exaggerations and fantasy successes, but the message seemed as if he was acknowledging defeat. Tonight, in the midst of another long rant on social media, Trump announced: “I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!”
Meanwhile, those combing through the files from Epstein’s estate released by the House Oversight Committee last week are turning up more disturbing information. Just a week before his arrest in 2019, Epstein wrote to Trump ally Steve Bannon: “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”
Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the horrors around Epstein will not be made easier by news reported yesterday by Robert Faturechi and Avi Asher-Schapiro of ProPublica that the Trump White House intervened to make Customs and Border Protection return the electronic devices they seized from accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan when they arrived in Florida earlier this year. The two have been accused of sex trafficking in Romania and the U.K.
Today Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice would release the files within 30 days as the law requires, but suggested the administration might try to bottle up the files because, at Trump’s demand, she opened an investigation into the Democrats named in them. She told reporters that she couldn’t comment on that investigation because “it is a pending investigation.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday showed Trump’s job approval rating has fallen another two percentage points since a similar poll in early November. A Marist poll released today shows that registered voters prefer Democrats to Republicans on a generic ballot for the 2026 midterms by an astonishing 14%. In November 2024, voters’ preference was divided evenly: 48% to 48%.
Trump’s hope of rigging the 2026 midterm elections took another hit yesterday when a panel of three federal judges said Texas could not use the new, mid-decade district map Trump demanded to shift five Democratic-dominated districts to Republican domination. In the 2019 Rucho v. Common Cause decision, the Supreme Court said that federal courts cannot review partisan gerrymandering, and so the Texas Republicans who redrew the districts insisted their gerrymandering was strictly about partisanship.
But two judges disagreed. Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, wrote that “[s]ubstantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.” Texas House minority leader Gene Wu, who led the Democratic lawmakers’ August walkout to prevent the redistricting, said the decision stopped “one of the most brazen attempts to steal our democracy that Texas has ever seen.”
Texas immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.
This afternoon the third judge, 79-year-old Reagan appointee Jerry Smith, released a scathing dissent, attacking Judge Brown personally and writing that “[t]he main winners from Judge Brown’s opinion are [Open Society Foundations founder] George Soros and [Democratic California governor] Gavin Newsom.”
The administration faced not just a loss but embarrassment in the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI director James Comey. Trump holds a grudge against Comey, who in 2017 refused to drop an investigation into Trump’s then-national security advisor Mike Flynn’s contacts with a Russian operative shortly before Trump took office.
In September of this year, then–U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Maryland Erik Seibert, a career prosecutor, said there was insufficient evidence for an indictment against Comey. Under pressure from Trump, Siebert resigned on September 19. The next day, the president posted on social media a message to Bondi that he apparently intended to be a private message, demanding the Justice Department indict Comey and others. That night, Trump appointed Lindsay Halligan, a White House aide who had no experience as a prosecutor, to replace Seibert; the legality of her appointment is being challenged in court.
Days later, Halligan returned a grand jury indictment against Comey for obstruction of justice and making false statements to Congress. Comey pleaded not guilty, his lawyers arguing that the charges were an act of vindictive prosecution by the president.
As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, in the process of working through some of the disagreements between the parties before trial in front of Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick, it emerged that the government had ignored rules for gathering evidence and also that Halligan appeared to have misled the grand jury, suggesting the grand jurors could “be assured the government has more evidence, perhaps better evidence,” than it had shown them. Vance called this “staggeringly wrong.” It also appeared that Halligan may have misled the jury by suggesting that Comey had to prove he was not guilty, when the actual requirement in a criminal case is that the government has to prove a defendant’s guilt.
Fitzpatrick also noted irregularities in the grand jury proceedings. As David French explained in the New York Times, Halligan initially tried to get an indictment on three counts, but the jury refused one of the charges. Somehow, Halligan signed two different indictments. The first “indicated that the grand jury failed to find probable cause as to any count,” and the second had two, rather than three, charges.
Today, in a hearing to consider whether Trump was prosecuting Comey vindictively, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Nachmanoff questioned Halligan herself, who admitted she had shown the final Comey indictment not to the whole grand jury but to only two of the grand jurors. Then one of the lawyers working with Halligan told the judge that the prosecutors who had handled the case before Halligan had drafted a memo explaining why they would not prosecute Comey. He noted that someone in the deputy attorney general’s office told him not to admit that information in court.
Comey’s lawyer, Michael Dreeben, is a national expert on criminal law who, in his time at the solicitor general’s office, represented the United States before the Supreme Court more than a hundred times. Dreeben urged the judge to throw out the case and strike a blow at Trump’s use of the criminal justice system to attack his perceived enemies.
Dreeben told the judge: “This has to stop.”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/18/congress/johnson-thune-epstein-files-gop-00658475
https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/a-look-to-the-2026-midterms-november-2025/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/18/politics/epstein-files-vote-house
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/11/19/congress/senate-clears-epstein-files-bill-00659041
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-trump-emails-texts-inner-circle/
https://www.propublica.org/article/andrew-tate-investigation-dhs-paul-ingrassia
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/federal-court-blocks-texas-gerrymander/
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/18/texas-democrats-return-redistricting-map-illinois/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/10/trump-doj-prosecutions-comey-james-00601838
https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-attorney-plans-resign-amid-pressure-trump-after/story?id=125750006
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5523879-lindsey-halligan-trump-comey-prosecutor/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj07ndrnr34o
