After weeks of delay by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) was finally sworn into office on Wednesday afternoon. She quickly became the 218th person needed to sign a bipartisan discharge petition that will trigger a House vote on the full release of the files the Justice Department has on the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Perhaps in anticipation of Grijalva’s plan to sign the petition immediately upon her swearing-in, White House officials were reportedly working overtime on Wednesday to try to persuade one Republican who had already signed the petition to remove their name and prevent the official collection of 218 signatures. While the petition will force a vote in the House on the release of the files, the measure is considered dead-on-arrival in the Senate. Should it get out of the Senate, President Trump is expected to veto it. Nonetheless, the president has “lobbied intensively behind the scenes” to stop a House vote from happening, in The New York Times’ words.
Some of President Trump’s top officials at the Justice Department were reportedly enlisted Wednesday to meet with one of the GOP signees, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). Boebert has been vocal for months about her support for the discharge petition.
Boebert was reportedly summoned to a meeting in the Situation Room with top DOJ and FBI leaders, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, according to The Times. Trump also personally connected with Boebert over the phone on Tuesday morning about the matter and was trying to get Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), who has also signed the petition, on the phone as well. The two were not able to connect, the Times reported.
It appears Trump administration officials’ lobbying of Boebert was not fruitful. Just after Grijalva signed the petition, an immediate effort to bring the measure to the floor for a vote was blocked over a procedural issue.
An Epstein-Trump Heavy News Day
In case you somehow missed the headlines, both Democrats and Republicans on the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday released tranches of documents the committee obtained from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. Some of it is not a good look for Trump, who has maintained for years that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. The lowlights:
- New York Times: “In one of the messages, Mr. Epstein flatly asserted that Mr. Trump ‘knew about the girls,’ many of whom were later found by investigators to have been underage. In another, Mr. Epstein pondered how to address questions from the news media about their relationship as Mr. Trump was becoming a national political figure.”
- House Oversight Committee Dems: “In private correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein wrote in 2011 that Donald Trump, ‘spent hours at my house’ with a victim of sex trafficking, referring to Trump as (the) ‘dog that hasn’t barked.'”
- Politico: “Nearly a month before President Donald Trump met Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, Jeffrey Epstein attempted to pass a message to Russia’s top diplomat: If you want to understand Trump, talk to me.”
Trump Deflects
In a desperate Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump claimed that the only reason Democrats are interested in elevating what he refers to as the “Epstein Hoax” again this week is because Senate Dems caved on the shutdown. This logic ignores the fact that the petition to force a vote is, as we mentioned above, bipartisan.
Speaking of the Shutdown Ending Legislation
This is unexpected, from Politico:
Several House GOP hard-liners are pushing to kill a provision contained in the shutdown-ending funding package that would allow senators to sue the government if their electronic records are obtained without their knowledge, according to two people granted anonymity to share private conversations.
…
But Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and other House Republicans aren’t sympathetic to the rationale. While they aren’t demanding the language be stripped from the government funding bill — which would punt it back to the Senate and delay the reopening of the government — they are instead pressing for a future vote on a separate, standalone piece of legislation that would invalidate the provision.
TPM in the Wild
From the Columbia Journalism Review: How Talking Points Memo lasted a quarter century.
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The fat fuck is a child rapist. Four young women testified under oath years ago that he raped them when they were 12 and 13 years old. This is already known. This Epstein file horseshit is nothing but a stalling tactic by both sides to run out the clock. None of these so-called “elites” want us to know how many of them are disgusting fucking perverts or they’d be fucked.
“I’ve been looking at her mortgage application papers.”
“THANKS FOR USING MY PREFERRED PRONOUN!”
“I ‘knew’ about them only in the BIBLICAL sense!”
“Um, that’s a GOOD thing to say, RIGHT?”
“And I’m sure there’s something there we can allege she did wrong.”