Top congressional Republicans and White House allies are working behind the scenes to prevent a politically charged floor vote to release the government’s Jeffrey Epstein case files next month, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.
The intensifying effort to halt that floor vote comes as Reps. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, declared on Wednesday they have the 218 votes needed to compel one when Congress returns. That final signature on their petition to force the vote will come from Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election in Arizona Tuesday night, once she is formally sworn in.
Discharge petitions historically have a bad track record of actually forcing a vote, mostly because lawmakers in the majority are wary of taking a stand against leadership. The Epstein issue, however, has animated some Republican members, with Trump allies on Capitol Hill like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina signing onto the petition.
While the exact strategy to avoid a vote is not yet clear, some of the GOP lawmakers who have signed on are privately being pressured to withdraw their name from the petition, which would prevent a vote from taking place, one of those sources said.
Boebert told CNN last week that she would not be removing her name from the petition, noting at the time that she was not getting pressured to do so.
GOP leaders are now working to prevent the vote from happening, one of the sources said, because Massie and Khanna are just days away from collecting the 218 signatures needed to force leadership’s hand. The pair had notched their 217th signature earlier this month when Democratic Rep. James Walkinshaw, fresh off winning a special election in Virginia’s 11th District, was sworn in and signed the petition.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has argued that Massie’s petition has been drafted in a way that does not adequately protect victims’ personal information and has said the full House has no need to take a vote while the Oversight Committee’s investigation is ongoing.
The last time Johnson was confronted with a discharge petition, he reached a compromise with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, the GOP lawmaker pushing the bill, and she agreed not to force the vote. Johnson had previously tried to kill Luna’s petition by inserting language – through the House Rules Committee – into an unrelated rule vote. That effort, however, failed on the floor.
Republicans on the House Rules Committee have made clear that this time, they will not help Johnson kill the Epstein files vote, a third source said.
While few Republicans have backed the effort to force a vote, a number have expressed support for the underlying bill. Still, it would face an uphill battle in the Senate if it cleared the House.
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