Michael Gold

It's a closet, more or less.

So the story here on Capitol Hill actually begins months ago in July.

And at the time, a lot of lawmakers here were very unhappy that the Trump administration had backtracked in their view on a promise to release the files.

And so two lawmakers, Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, and Thomas Massey, a Republican from Kentucky, decide that they're going to introduce a bill that would force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files.

At the same time, there's a lot of skepticism that this bill will actually ever come to a vote.

And so Democrats on the House Oversight Committee use the committee to begin forcing subpoenas on the Epstein investigation.

And it eventually expands to include Republicans who want to see additional subpoenas and are interested in getting more information released.

So you have a bill that would force the Justice Department to release the files and an investigation coming out of the Oversight Committee that

That's a larger investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and how the Trump administration handled the case.

That's right.

And one telling detail, I think, about this whole saga that gets us to today is that Speaker Mike Johnson does not want to support this bill.

He opposes a bill that would force the Trump administration to do anything on the Epstein files.

But as he is opposing the bill, he points to this investigation the Oversight Committee is doing frequently and says, well, this is the avenue that we need to take if we want to get full transparency here.

That's right.

And so because the White House and Republican leadership are opposed to this bipartisan bill, Thomas Massey and Ro Khanna file what's known as a discharge petition.

And the shorthand for a discharge petition is that if 218 members of the House, which is a majority of the body, agree on any one particular issue, they can force the House to vote on a bill.

And so Speaker Johnson essentially says, we don't need to do this.

We don't need to force a vote that would circumvent leadership.

We can look at the Oversight Committee and their investigation, and they'll do the work for us.

And what ends up happening is the Oversight Committee gets all of these documents from Jeffrey Epstein's estate, and it's the information in those materials that they end up releasing today.