With President Trump giving the green light, it was a forgone conclusion that this vote to release the Epstein files would pass. They already had the votes, but with the president’s blessing, all the votes lined up in favor of this motion. There was one lone Republican who voted ‘no,’ Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), on due process grounds. The final vote was 427-1.
Higgins explained:
I have been a principled “NO” on this bill from the beginning. What was wrong with the bill three months ago is still wrong today. It abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America. As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people – witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc. If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt. Not by my vote. The Oversight Committee is conducting a thorough investigation that has already released well over 60,000 pages of documents from the Epstein case. That effort will continue in a manner that provides all due protections for innocent Americans. If the Senate amends the bill to properly address privacy of victims and other Americans, who are named but not criminally implicated, then I will vote for that bill when it comes back to the House.
This circus is now entertaining. First, Democrats are being named in this fiasco, which now has progressives rehashing what we’ve been saying about these files for years: being named in them is not an admission of guilt, nor is it evidence of partaking in the pedophilic enterprises of the late disgraced New York financier. Democrats were texting with Epstein during anti-Trump hearings on the Hill. No doubt Congress is going to screw this up, someone is going to shoot their mouth off, and defamation lawsuits are going to pour down.
But the Democrats wanted this—well, until Trump said he wanted the files released.
The bill now heads to the Senate.
