US President Donald Trump on Wednesday approved a new law that requires the Justice Department to make all files linked to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, public. The bill, called the Epstein Files Transparency Act, was earlier passed by the US House of Representatives with a 427-1 vote, and the Senate cleared it without any opposition.
What did Trump say?
“Democrats have used the ‘Epstein’ issue, which affects them far more than the Republican Party, in order to try and distract from our AMAZING Victories,” Trump wrote on Truth Social as he signed the bill. Here’s his full post:
Now that the bill has been passed by Congress and signed by the President, the Justice Department must release all documents and communications related to Epstein, including details from the investigation into his death in a federal prison in 2019, within 30 days.
What does the bill say?
The bill allows some information to be hidden if it protects Epstein’s victims or ongoing investigations. But it clearly says that the Justice Department cannot hold back documents just because they might cause “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”
The effort to force the release of the Epstein files started in an unexpected way, backed by an unusual group of lawmakers — Democrats, a Republican critic of Trump, and a few former Trump allies who broke away from him.
Even last week, the administration was trying to slow the push. Officials called in Representative Lauren Boebert, one of the Republicans supporting the bill, to the Situation Room to talk about it, but she refused to change her mind.
By the weekend, Trump changed his position, realising that Congress was moving forward whether he supported the bill or not. He said the constant attention on Epstein had become an unnecessary distraction from the Republican Party’s main goals.
The House passed the bill with a huge majority, 427-1. The lone opponent, Representative Clay Higgins from Louisiana, warned that the bill might accidentally reveal private information about people who had done nothing wrong but were mentioned in federal investigation materials.
The Senate later approved the bill unanimously without a roll-call vote.
Trump has long been known to have been socially connected to Epstein, the disgraced financier who mixed with powerful political and business figures. But Trump has repeatedly said he did not know about Epstein’s crimes and had cut ties with him years earlier.
Before Trump returned to the White House for a second term, several of his allies helped spread conspiracy theories about how the government handled the Epstein case. They suggested that authorities were hiding damaging information contained in the files.