Trump tries to turn the tables on the Epstein story

With the U.S. House of Representatives poised to vote overwhelmingly Tuesday for a bill demanding that all Department of Justice documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein be released, Donald Trump has belatedly jumped on the bandwagon.

For months, the U.S. president opposed the release of the so-called Epstein files, despite promising transparency on the issue during last year's election campaign.

Although key figures in Trump's White House — JD Vance, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi — championed the release of the files when Joe Biden was president, the Trump administration and Republicans allies in Congress have manoeuvred to keep them under wraps.

Trump's stated rationale for suddenly reversing course and telling Republicans to vote for the files' release wasn't a call for justice for the survivors of Epstein's sex trafficking operation, nor a push for transparency .

It's that he doesn't want the Epstein controversy to overshadow his accomplishments.

"What I just don't want Epstein to do is detract from the great success of the Republican Party," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.

"All I want is, I want for people to recognize the great job that I've done, on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down, but they're going way lower."

The White House is on a push to persuade Americans that their concerns about the cost of living are unfounded. The Epstein saga threatens to drown out that message.

'Prices are way down'

On Monday, Trump laid out his case for changing the channel in a 48-minute speech at the McDonald's Impact Summit, a gathering of the fast-food giant's top executives and franchise owners.

"The Biden administration started the affordability crisis and my administration is ending it," Trump told the gathering in Washington.

"Nobody has done what we've done in terms of pricing," he said. "Prices are way down."

The speech got little media attention, and certainly far less than the Epstein story.

That media coverage is highly unlikely to shift on Tuesday, when the House is expected to vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

If it becomes law, the bill would require the Department of Justice (DOJ) to make a public disclosure within 30 days of all unclassified documents and investigative materials that relate to Epstein or his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year sentence for aiding Epstein's sexual abuse of underage girls.

The list of material that could be disclosed is extensive. Including:

• Flight logs.
• Individuals named in connection with Epstein’s criminal activities.
• Corporate entities with alleged ties to Epstein’s trafficking networks.
• Internal DOJ communications concerning decisions to investigate or not investigate Epstein or his associates.

Yet releasing the files doesn't require an act of Congress. Trump could simply order their release himself, as he did earlier this year with the investigative files into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

However, Trump himself has thrown up another potential hurdle to releasing the Epstein files. He ordered his Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Epstein's connections to three prominent Democrats: former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman.

WATCH | Greene, Trump feud over Epstein:

Trump feuds with Marjorie Taylor Greene over Epstein files

November 17|

Duration2:49

U.S. President Donald Trump attacked his vocal Republican ally, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, on social media seemingly over her push to release the Epstein files. The feud is dividing the MAGA movement and fuelling questions about Trump's ties to the convicted sex offender.

Active investigation

Lawmakers say the DOJ could refuse to disclose the files because they're subject to an active investigation.

"This might be a big smokescreen … as a last-ditch effort to prevent the release of the Epstein files," said Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who co-sponsored the bill, in an interview on ABC's This Week.

Democrat Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico says she believes Trump ordered the investigation "because he thinks it gives him legal cover not to disclose the files," she told MSNOW (the newly rebranded cable outlet formerly known as MSNBC) on Monday.

Clinton, Summers and Hoffman are named in a tranche of more than 20,000 emails that Epstein sent or received in the decade before his 2019 death, released last week by the House Oversight committee. Trump is mentioned more than 1,500 times in the emails.

No evidence has been made public that any of them were involved in Epstein's crimes. Epstein struck a plea deal in 2008 on state charges of soliciting prostitution involving a minor, then killed himself in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.

The vote in the House comes as an anti-trafficking advocacy group called World Without Exploitation released a powerful public service announcement featuring women who were abused by Epstein.

In the video, the women hold photos of themselves as teenagers, some as young as 14, and say "This is me when I met Jeffrey Epstein." The video ends with a message urging Americans to call their member of Congress to demand the release of all the Epstein files.

Trump said in July: “I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It’s pretty boring stuff."

Now, after months of downplaying the Epstein story, Trump's about-face on the vote in the House may not be enough to ward off the criticism he's facing, even from some elements of his MAGA base.

It's hard to envision how Trump could shut down the clamour for transparency with anything short of full public release.