Congress acts swiftly to force release of Epstein files, and Trump agrees to sign bill

WASHINGTON (AP) — Both the House and Senate acted decisively Tuesday to pass a bill to force the Justice Department to publicly release its files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a remarkable display of approval for an effort that had struggled for months to overcome opposition from President Donald Trump and Republican leadership.

When a small, bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a petition in July to maneuver around Speaker Mike Johnson’s control of the House floor, it appeared a longshot effort — especially as Trump urged his supporters to dismiss the matter as a “hoax.”

But both Trump and Johnson failed to prevent the vote. The president in recent days bowed to political reality, saying he would sign the bill. And just hours after the House vote, senators agreed to approve it unanimously, skipping a formal roll call.

The decisive, bipartisan work in Congress Tuesday further showed the pressure mounting on lawmakers and the Trump administration to meet long-held demands that the Justice Department release its case files on Epstein, a well-connected financier who killed himself in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in 2019 on charges he sexually abused and trafficked underage girls.

For survivors of Epstein’s abuse, passage of the bill was a watershed moment in a years-long quest for accountability.

“These women have fought the most horrific fight that no woman should have to fight. And they did it by banding together and never giving up," said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as she stood with some of the abuse survivors outside the Capitol Tuesday morning.

“That’s what we did by fighting so hard against the most powerful people in the world, even the president of the United States, in order to make this vote happen today,” added Greene, a Georgia Republican.

In the end, only one lawmaker in Congress opposed the bill. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican who is a fervent supporter of Trump, was the only “nay” vote in the House's 427-1 tally. He said he worried the legislation could lead to the release of information on innocent people mentioned in the federal investigation.

The bill forces the release within 30 days of all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison. It would allow the Justice Department to redact information about Epstein’s victims or continuing federal investigations, but not information due to “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”

Even before the bill's passage Tuesday, thousands of pages of emails and other documents from Epstein's estate have been released from an investigation by the House Oversight Committee.

Those documents show Epstein's connections to global leaders, Wall Street powerbrokers, influential political figures and Trump himself. In the United Kingdom, King Charles III stripped his disgraced brother Prince Andrew of his remaining titles and evicted him from his royal residence after pressure to act over his relationship with Epstein.

Trump has said he cut ties with Epstein years ago, but tried for months to move past the demands for disclosure.

Still, many in the Republican base continued to demand the release of the files. Adding to that pressure, survivors of Epstein's abuse rallied outside the Capitol Tuesday morning. Bundled in jackets against the November chill and holding photos of themselves as teenagers, they recounted their stories of abuse.

“We are exhausted from surviving the trauma and then surviving the politics that swirl around it," said one of the survivors.

Another, Jena-Lisa Jones, said she had voted for Trump and had a message for the president: “I beg you Donald Trump, please stop making this political.”

The group of women also met with Johnson and rallied outside the Capitol in September, but have had to wait months for the vote.

That's because Johnson kept the House closed for legislative business for nearly two months and refused to swear-in Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona during the government shutdown. After winning a special election on Sept. 23, Grijalva had pledged to provide the crucial 218th vote to the petition for the Epstein files bill. But only after she was sworn into office last week could she sign her name to the discharge petition to give it majority support in the 435-member House.

It quickly became obvious the bill would pass, and both Johnson and Trump began to fold. Trump on Sunday said Republicans should vote for the bill.

Yet Greene told reporters that Trump's decision to fight the bill had betrayed his Make America Great Again political movement.

"Watching this turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart,” she said.

Rather than waiting until next week for the discharge position to officially take effect, Johnson held the vote under a procedure that requires a two-thirds majority.

But Johnson also spent a morning news conference listing off problems that he sees with the legislation. He argued that the bill could have unintended consequences by disclosing parts of federal investigations that are usually kept private, including information on victims.

“This is a raw and obvious political exercise," Johnson said.

Still, he voted for the bill. “None of us want to go on record and in any way be accused of not being for maximum transparency,” he explained.

Meanwhile, the bipartisan pair who sponsored the bill, Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., warned senators against doing anything that would “muck it up,” saying they would face the same public uproar that forced both Trump and Johnson to back down.

“We’ve needlessly dragged this out for four months,” Massie said, adding that those raising problems with the bill “are afraid that people will be embarrassed. Well, that’s the whole point here.”

Even as the bill cleared his chamber, Johnson pressed for the Senate to amend it to protect the information of “victims and whistleblowers.” But Senate Majority Leader John Thune quickly shut down that notion.

As senators gathered in the chamber Tuesday evening for the first votes of the week, it became clear no one would object to passing the bill as written.

Just before Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called to pass the bill by unanimous consent, Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican who is close to Trump, walked in the chamber and gave Schumer a thumbs-up. He then walked over to Schumer and shook his hand.

“This is about giving the American people the transparency they’ve been crying for,” said Schumer, D-N.Y. “This is about holding accountable all the people in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle who raped, groom, targeted and enabled the abuse of hundreds of girls for years and years.”

Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Joey Cappelletti, Matt Brown, Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., attends a news conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

This image from House Television shows the final vote in the House to pass a bill to force the Justice Department to publicly release its files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025, at the u.S. Capitol in Washington. (House Television via AP)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., arrives to a news conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025, outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

A World Without Exploitation projection is seen on the wall of the National Gallery of Art calling on Congress to vote yes on the Epstein files transparency act in Washington, Monday, Nov. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., speaks during a news conference on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025, outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

President Donald Trump speaks at the McDonald's Impact Summit, Monday, Nov. 17, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., speaks to reporters as the House heads toward a vote on a bill to force the Justice Department to release the case files it has collected on the late financier Jeffrey Epstein at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Nov. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel appears before the House Judiciary Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — After the arrest of a man charged with placing two pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic national parties on Jan. 5, 2021, the warning from the Trump administration was clear: If you come to the nation's capital to attack citizens and institutions of democracy, you will be held accountable.

Yet Justice Department leaders who announced the arrest were silent about the violence that had taken place when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol and clashed with police one day after those bombs were placed.

It was the latest example of the Trump's administration's to rewrite the history of the riot, through pardons and the firings of lawyers who prosecuted the participants of the siege, and of the disconnect for a government that prides itself for cracking down on violent crime and supporting law enforcement but has papered over the brutality of the Jan. 6 attacks on police officers.

“The administration has ignored and attempted to whitewash the violence committed by rioters on Jan. 6 because they were the president's supporters. They were trying to install him a second time against the will of the voters in 2020,” said Michael Romano, who prosecuted the rioters before leaving the Justice Department this year. “And it feels like the effort to ignore that is purely transactional.”

The White House referred comment to the Justice Department, which referred comment to the FBI. The bureau did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press on Friday.

FBI Director Kash Patel, as a conservative podcast host during the Biden administration, had called the Jan. 6 rioters “political prisoners” and offered to represent them for free. But on Thursday, he said the arrest of the pipe bomb suspect, 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr., was in keeping with Trump's commitment to “secure our nation's capital.”

“When you attack American citizens, when you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack the nation’s capital, you attack the very being of our way of life,” Patel said. “And this FBI and this Department of Justice stand here to tell you that we will always combat it.”

Patel's deputy, Dan Bongino, had suggested before joining the FBI that federal law enforcement had wasted time investigating Jan. 6 rioters and anti-abortion activists.

“These are threats to the United States?” he said on a podcast last year. “Grandma is in the gulag for a trespassing charge on January 6th.”

Bongino indicated last year he believed the pipe bomb incident was an “inside job” that involved a “massive cover-up.” After joining the FBI, Bongino repeatedly described t the investigation as a top priority that was receiving significant resources and attention.

“We were going to track this person to the end of the earth. There was no way he was getting away,” he said Thursday.

No public link has emerged between the pipe bombs and the riot, and Cole's arrest was a significant development in a long-running investigation that had confounded authorities, who are now are assembling a portrait of Cole. People familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that among the statements Cole made to investigators is that he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, which Trump has insisted was stolen from him in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. The people were not authorized to discuss ongoing investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

There was no widespread fraud in that election, which a range of election officials across the country, including Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, have confirmed. Republican governors in key states crucial to Biden’s victory have also vouched for the integrity of the elections in their states. Nearly all the legal challenges from Trump and his allies were dismissed by the courts.

The tough-on-crime words heard during Thursday's announcement about Cole's arrest were at odds with the Republican administration's repeated efforts to play down the violence of Jan. 6, absolve those charged in the insurrection and target those who investigated and prosecuted the rioters.

Trump’s clemency action on his first day back in the White House in January applied to all 1,500-plus people charged with participating in the attack on the foundations of American democracy. That included defendants seen on camera violently attacking police with makeshift weapons such as flagpoles, a crutch and a hockey stick. More than 100 police officers were injured, including some who have described being scared for their lives as they were dragged into the crowd and beaten.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department asked the FBI for the names of agents who participated in Jan. 6 investigations, a demand feared within the bureau for as a possible precursor to mass firings. In August, Patel fired Brian Driscoll, who as the FBI's acting director in the early days of the Trump administration resisted handing over those names.

Trump's administration, meanwhile, has fired or demoted numerous prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases, including more than two dozen lawyers who had been hired for temporary assignments to support the investigation but were moved into permanent roles after Trump won the 2024 election.

In October, two federal prosecutors were locked out of their government devices and told they were being put on leave after filing court papers that described those who attacked the Capitol as a “mob of rioters.” The Justice Department later submitted a new court filing that stripped mentions of the Jan. 6 riot.

One man whose case was dismissed because of Trump’s pardons was accused of hurling an explosive device and a large piece of wood at a group of officers who trying to defend an entrance to the Capitol. Some officers later said they had “believed they were going to die,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, and several reported suffering temporary hearing loss.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, left, and FBI Director Kash Patel stand during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

FILE - This image shows part of a "Seeking Information" notice released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding pipe bombs planted outside offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, on the eve of the attack on the Capitol. (FBI via AP, File)

Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel look at each other during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)