The Senate has officially passed a bill that would force the Department of Justice to release all materials related to Jeffrey Epstein, marking an end to a saga that consumed Congress for several months.
The House sent over the bill early Tuesday morning, which triggered immediate passage of the legislation after no Senate Republican blocked an attempt by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to fast track the bill through the upper chamber.
It now heads to president Donald Trump’s desk.
Schumer argued on the floor that the Senate ‘should pass this bill as soon as possible, as written and without a hint of delay.’
‘Republicans must not try to change this bill or bury it in committee, or slow walk it in any way,’ he said. ‘Any amendment to this bill would force it back to the House and risk further delay. Who knows what would happen over there?’
The resolution from Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., would require that the Department of Justice (DOJ) release all unclassified records, documents, communications and investigative materials ‘publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format’ related to the late financier and convicted pedophile and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell within 30 days of the bill being signed into law.
The Epstein fervor has not had nearly the impact in the Senate as the House, which was thrust into chaos by the bipartisan push to see the release of the files. Earlier this year, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., put the House into recess to quell the Epstein drama and has since been accused of running from a vote on the issue.
The drama that roiled through the House, and sidelined lawmakers for several weeks came and went through the Senate in a matter of minutes Tuesday night.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that Republicans were already mulling the bill through the hotline process, which is where legislation is considered among lawmakers before making it to the floor. Thune said the plan, if the bill clears the hotline, would be to have it on the floor before lawmakers leave for Thanksgiving recess at the end of this week.
‘We’ll see what the Democrats have to say,’ he said. ‘But it’s the kind of thing, probably, that could perhaps move by unanimous consent.’
That ended up not being necessary, with bill making its way through the upper chamber without a full vote.
The calculus surrounding the Epstein bill changed in the Senate, too, given that President Donald Trump, who for months railed against attempts to release the files, threw his support behind Massie and Khanna’s legislation over the weekend.
He charged that it was a ‘Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.’
‘Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive and, if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it before our Landslide Election Victory,’ he said in a post on Truth Social.
Senate Republicans, like their counterparts in the House, wanted more transparency on the issue when the Epstein saga resurfaced over the summer but cautioned that no materials should be released until the names or identifying traits of victims are combed through and kept safe.
But, despite calls from Johnson to amend the bill to include those kinds of guardrails in the legislation, it’s unlikely to happen in the Senate.
‘I think when a bill comes out of the House 427 to one, and the president said he’d sign it, I’m not sure that amending it is in the cards,’ Thune said.
