"It's time to move on from this Democratic hoax," Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social .
He claims that the controversy surrounding the documents about convicted and now-dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein can be traced to the opposing party’s attempt to “divert attention, just like with the (Russia) election interference investigation.” He claims that it is actually Democrats who “had shady dealings with Epstein and should be prosecuted!”
Warns party comrades
But representatives of Trump's own party, the Republicans, emphasize that it is about transparency, and that the aftermath of the vote will last longer than Trump's presidency.
"Donald Trump may protect you in (Republican) red districts right now, by giving you his support. But in 2030 he won't be president and you will have voted to protect pedophiles," Representative Thomas Massie warns his party colleagues in an interview with ABC News .
He and his Democratic colleague Ro Khanna have taken an unusual bipartisan initiative to push for a vote. Last week, they reached the goal of collecting enough signatures to force a vote, something that House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump loyalist, has slowed down.
The question of whether all the material included in the Epstein investigation – hundreds of thousands of documents – should be made public has been hotly debated in the United States over the past year. Many in Trump's often politically disdainful Magar movement want to see the material, as there are suspicions that powerful people appear in it. During the election campaign, Donald Trump promised to make everything public, but after moving into the White House he vacillated.
Now the president, who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein in the early 2000s, has changed his mind again. He likely realized that a vote was inevitable, writes Axios .
On to the Senate?
The move comes after first Democrats and then Republicans on the House of Representatives' oversight committee last week released tens of thousands of emails from the investigation. According to the material, Donald Trump was well aware of what was going on behind Epstein's walls, but did not participate in the abuse of teenage girls.
A procedural vote on the Epstein documents could be held in the House of Representatives as early as Monday night, followed by a vote on Tuesday, Politico reports. The bill would then need to be approved by the Senate and signed by Trump himself. It is unclear whether this will happen.
Tina Magnergård Bjers/TT
Background: The twists surrounding Jeffrey Epstein
TT
An investigation into businessman Jeffrey Epstein began in 2005 after a 14-year-old girl told police she had been molested by him at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. The investigation grew and in 2007 he was indicted in federal court.
After a plea deal with prosecutors, Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sex trafficking in 2008. He was released after 13 months.
The case received renewed attention in 2018 after a series of articles in the Miami Herald in which several women came forward and accused Epstein of sexual assault during the period 2001 to 2005.
In July 2019, Epstein was arrested at an airport in New Jersey. The new charges against him concerned the abuse of dozens of underage girls between 2002 and 2005. According to the prosecution, Epstein tried to buy the silence of witnesses with millions of dollars. Epstein denies the crime.
On August 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell in Manhattan's New York City jail. He was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. It is believed he took his own life, but this is disputed.
A prominent plaintiff against Epstein was Virginia Giuffre, who died earlier this year. She claimed that Epstein’s convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell discovered her at Donald Trump’s Florida spa when she was 17 and hired her as Epstein’s masseuse—his “sex slave.” Giuffre also accused Britain’s Prince Andrew of rape, which ended in an out-of-court settlement between the parties.
