The White House is pressuring Massie, Greene, and Boebert to drop the issue. But they’re not backing down.
Most years, September in Washington offers a fresh start: Lawmakers return from August recess and begin establishing their policy and messaging priorities for the new legislative session.
Unfortunately for the Trump White House, that clean slate has already been soiled by a long-running controversy over Jeffrey Epstein that, try as he might, President Trump just can’t shake.
Libertarian-leaning Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) is doing his best to keep it that way.
A longtime thorn in House GOP leaders’ side, Massie has spent months urging the Justice Department to release all information the U.S. government has related to the deceased financier and convicted sex offender’s relationships with politicians and prominent figures.
Now, Massie’s teaming up with Democratic Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) to try and force a vote on the House floor that would require the Justice Department to release more Epstein-related information to the public. To draw attention to his effort, Massie held a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol alongside Epstein victims who support his discharge petition
The White House is not happy, to say the least. “This is a Democrat hoax that never ends,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday, adding that “nobody is ever satisfied” with the documents that have already been released. And as of this week, some administration officials are working the phones to try and quell the Massie-led effort.
Only three Republicans have joined Massie and almost every House Democrat in signing the Massie-Khanna petition: Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), Nancy Mace (R., S.C), and Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.). Some of those Republican signatories received phone calls from the White House asking them to flip, National Review has learned.
In the latest sign that this discharge petition is fracturing the hardcore MAGA base, Greene openly criticized the president’s refusal to legitimize the concerns of those seeking more transparency. “Today [Trump] called it a hoax while these women were speaking out,” the Georgia Republican said in a Wednesday television interview. “It’s not a hoax because Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted pedophile.”
Massie has Democratic House leaders in his corner. That means if he can keep those three Republicans on side, and all 212 Democrats sign on, Massie needs just two more GOP congressmen to hit the magic 218 number required to bring the petition to the floor for a vote.
But finding two more Republicans could prove tricky. In supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid and needling the administration on the Epstein issue, Massie has unleashed the wrath of Trump’s political team, which is now trying to oust him in his 2026 House primary.
House GOP leaders are urging their members against supporting Massie’s discharge petition and are instead asking them to support the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s efforts to obtain information from the Justice Department, as well as people who worked on the Epstein case and lawyers for the deceased financier’s estate. They succeeded in passing a GOP-drafted measure on Wednesday that endorses said inquiry.
“I don’t begrudge anything that the victims have said,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) told reporters when asked about a press conference Massie held on Wednesday alongside Epstein victims. “It’s a heroic thing that they’re doing,” he added. “But there are hundreds and hundreds of other women, some of them recruited and groomed as minors, as young as 13 years old, who do not want their identities to be known.”
White House officials emphasize that the Justice Department is cooperating with the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee’s recent August subpoena and that the DOJ released interview transcripts of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s interview with Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. The Republican-controlled House also released on Tuesday a giant tranche of documents that the DOJ handed over last month.
But Democrats and some Republicans claim that only a smidgeon of the information that was publicly released this week – including Customs and Border Protection flight logs surrounding Epstein’s travels – contain new information, and that many of those files have already been made available to the public through court documents. The names on the flight logs were redacted.
“You can’t tell me all the people that were redacted were all victims. That’s not how this works,” Representative Nancy Mace, who supports Massie’s discharge petition, told National Review in a brief interview on Wednesday. “The least we could do is release the files, and the next best step would be to prosecute those who did wrong.”
Pressed about the White House’s lobbying effort, a White House official said: “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 did not dispute that administration officials are privately putting pressure on discharge petition signers to reverse course.
“Massie is working with Democrats to chase a phantom. The Epstein victim lawyer he had at his own event admitted that there is no such thing as an Epstein list,” another senior White House official told National Review. (When pressed by a reporter on whether he thinks there is a concrete list of Epstein clients, Brad Edwards, an attorney for Epstein victims Edwards said: “For certain of his friends, he farmed out certain of the women he was exploiting. …I don’t think he wrote down a list.”)
The White House official also accused Democrats of sitting on their hands while Democratic administrations could have revealed the information they are requesting. “Are the Democrats alleging that Merrick Garland was involved in a coverup? It sure sounds like it.”
After his press conference with Epstein victims, Massie doubled down on his discharge petition and insisted that the government is hiding names.
“They’ve got the information required to produce the list,” Massie told reporters on Wednesday afternoon when pressed about the White House’s claim that he’s sending lawmakers on a “phantom” chase. “Now have do they have an Excel spreadsheet with names in it? Probably not at the DOJ, but they’ve got names, and they’re protecting them.”
He emphasized that during Wednesday’s press conference, the victims said they know the identities of some of the perpetrators and will work to compile a list themselves but may keep it private to avoid defamation lawsuits.
“See, this is the problem they face. Is every time they go out and do something, there’s some kind of counter suit, and they don’t have the financial resources to keep up that, and they get ruined,” Massie added. “So at our press conference, Marjorie volunteered that if the survivors put together a list, she would read it on the floor of the House,” where members of Congress enjoy immunity under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause.