Bulwark Takes - House Republicans Just Punted the Epstein Files

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger unpack how House Republicans are dodging a vote on a resolution to release the Epstein files, despite previously championing transparency on the issue. The conversation highlights how GOP leaders are aligning with Trump’s interests over public disclosure, even as conspiracy-minded constituents demand answers.  They also explore Trump’s retaliation against the Wall Street Journal for its reporting on a bizarre card he allegedly sent to Epstein, including booting a Journal reporter from the press pool. They argue this fits a broader pattern of Trump undermining press freedom and avoiding scrutiny. Finally, they note how the Epstein story is gaining traction in surprising corners of the internet, including among right-wing podcasters like Theo Von. 

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Ben MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey guys, it's me Sam Stein, managing editor of the Bullwark joined by Andrew Egger, author of Morning Shots. We're here to talk about something we've never talked about before. So buckle in. Jeffrey Epstein, may have heard of him.

He's casting a poll over the Trump presidency. And then apparently members of the House don't want to deal with this either. So the news that happened today, I should just be specific with Republican members of the House, news that happened today is that the House Republicans are going to put off a vote on a resolution that would have called for the release of the Epstein files. I don't even think it would have demanded the release. It was just like a sense of the house that they have that they should release the Epstein files and they're just not going to vote on it.

They're just going to push it off through August. And it's kind of crazy to me that they're just going to duck it. Unless you think that they just are doing Trump's bidding, I'm having trouble coming up with a really convincing explanation other than that. But Andrew, what do you make of this? I mean, I also have been like kind of trying to think of other explanations.

There is a little bit of like, you know, kind of grumpy, we're the majority and we're not gonna let, you know, members of the minority tell us what to do sort of stuff in all of this, but all along, I mean, the, the release, the Epstein file stuff has been the kind of thing that you would see from like the more sort of like base attuned members of the Republican party. I mean, this is like a long standing thing of people like Marjorie Taylor green tweeting about Epstein and the fact that it has just so immediately reversed based on just the perception that, you know, more

transparency suddenly must be bad for Donald Trump in some way is really I mean, like, we've gone around and around and around the story. But I feel like we have to belabor the point. It is shocking that that it is so quickly become Oh, Trump doesn't want to release this stuff. I wonder why that is. And then Democrats jumping on it and asking for more transparency and Republicans digging in their heels. It's a complete 180 from where things were on this just a little while ago.

I was going to say, imagine like two years ago, a resolution went to the House floor calling for the release of the Epstein files. What would the Republican vote be on that? It would be unanimous, right? Who would be on that? It would be unanimous, right? I mean, who would be against it? It's hard to fathom that anyone would have voted against it. The second story, which is related to this, because this gets at how angry the White House is on this front, is that the Wall Street Journal reporter who was supposed to cover

Donald Trump in his weekend trip to Scotland as part of the pool is apparently, according to Politico, being removed from the pool. And this is, of course, following the report from the Wall Street Journal that President Trump allegedly reportedly sent a sexually suggestive message slash poem slash drawing doodle to Jeffrey Epstein as part of his 50th birthday celebration in 2003. Trump has sued the journal sued Rupert Murdoch and now they're kicking the journal out of the pool which is sort of classically you know classic Trump I guess. Yeah and not to like immediately go from what is a very significant story in terms of you know, this presidency with the FC and files and the handling of all that to this

much more inside baseball thing about, you know, pool coverage and who gets to decide who covers the president. But this is an important story too. I mean, it matters. And this is I think a thing that kind of got swept under the rug or not. That's not the right way of putting it. But it was it was it didn't get nearly the airtime it deserved when Trump was kind of breaking the norms on this earlier in his terms, just because there was so much other stuff going on when he basically declared war on the White House Correspondence Association, when the White House seized control of who was going to get to be in the press, press room and who was going to get to ask the questions and who was going to get to be in the pool in particular.

And before it was kind of like, like I say, this sort of inside baseball, the story and flavor, but what it ultimately boils down to is what we're seeing now, which is that the White House gets to pressure every outlet not to do enterprise reporting, investigative work on stuff that is gonna make the White House mad because they will yank their access instantly. And I think that, you know,

I would be shocked not to see a lot more of this going forward. Right. And I guess in a sort of more organized way, the White House pool and the White House Correspondents Association would say, you can't do that, or we're just going to limit everyone, or let you know, some sort of collective action, but that's not going to happen here, because precisely, it didn't happen after they kicked the API for not doing the Gulf of America shit. So why would they now?

I just going back to the first story. So I just want to read what the political reports about Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson doesn't have any plans to put a non-binding resolution on the floor this week after the August recess or possibly ever, they write, that would call for the administration to release the Jeffrey Epstein related documents and said GOP leaders have an understanding with White House officials that the House will wait to address the matter until after the month long break in order to give the administration time to release documents on its own following president Trump's move to release grand jury

information, this information, he just meant testimony on the case. Um, all right. So they're going to go home for like four or five weeks, right? And what do you expect to happen here? Is it? Part of me wonders if this is like maybe we were sort of in a different conversation than everyone else because we're so plugged in on this shit and you know, they won't get confronted back home at the artist recess.

Then part of me wonders if like, in fact, they will because the people who care about the stuff happen to be the most politically attuned people and the most likely to show up at events. Yeah, that's a really interesting open question. I hadn't thought about it that way that they might receive more constituent pressure over this. I think a lot of these people are actively mad at Trump, more so than their random Senator or Congressman, right?

Sure. Maybe there's an element of, it's not like that's the thing they're going to show up at the town hall to talk about. Yeah, but they're like they're the conspiracy theorists, right? They're the ones who usually show up. I mean, that's what I've been kind of thinking about is like the Lyndon LaRushian types like who show up at these things to protest because they think deep down inside there is actually a global satanic pedophile cabal that's controlling everything. I mean, if that doesn't compel you to show up and talk to your member of Congress, I mean, I don't know what's gonna compel you to show up. Right, right.

They do run that risk. I do think it is still a smart move from the Trump administration to be leaning on, leaning on the house to do this, right? I mean, I think they are trying, at least in some ways, like I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to see one, will this thing finally blow over?

Will I be able to, I mean, we've seen this from Trump all weekend is that he's trying to create other stories that his base will run after and pay more attention to. And this will at least get backburnered. And then maybe, you know, the pressure will be off, the Congress won't feel the need to do anything. And at the same time, I mean, I don't feel like I'm putting on a conspiracy theorist hat here to say there's a difference between Congress ordering the White House to release everything it has right now and the White House getting to kind of set its

own schedule and decide what comes out and decide what stays buried. I mean, this is what Trump has been saying all along is, Pam Bondi should just release the stuff that's credible or that's pertinent, right? I mean, and there's an enormous amount of judgment call that goes into that for all these people who are just about political flags for Donald Trump, right? You wrote you wrote about this this morning, which is they are trying to distract and I think saying release the pertinent

stuff and the grand jury testimonies, that's like, one degree away from a distraction, right? It's not everything. They're just hoping that a little bit of show can get them away from the storyline. But then you have them like saying, let's arrest Rosie O'Donnell and Barack Obama and let's change the name of the Washington Commanders

back to the, yeah. Yeah, I mean, so like there's all these distractions and I am just sort of, I know Will Summers reporting on this today, but like I am curious if people just see through it and they're like, can I say one more thing on the Congress stuff? Cause you mentioned like, if this had happened two years ago, well, here I go, here I go, watch me.

You're in, you're a whole other place. You're on the other side of the internet for me and I'm gonna talk. So you mentioned like, if this had come up two years ago, you know, Republicans would have gotten on board with it. Can you imagine, just like put yourself in that imaginative head space and think about the conservative media coverage of Republicans pushing en masse to release the Epstein files

and the Democrats in the House in open coordination with the Democratic White House spiking that vote and saying, we're not going to do this. We're not going to let any of this happen. Come on. The conspiracy theories would have been completely off of the charts. Like, and the what is Biden in the Epstein files? What's Biden trying to hide? You know, all of that stuff, you can just completely game out exactly how it would happen. And yet

it would have programmed Alex Jones's show for like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I, so the, the legislation that is being introduced to get or to compel the release of this Epstein case information is being introduced by Tom Massey and Ro Khanna, it's a bipartisan duo. So they want to vote on a measure, it's discharge petition, what's described as maneuver that allows them to bypass leadership, force a vote on the floor if it receives 218 signatures and it's picking up steam. Reach out to Ro Khanna about Mike Johnson doing this. And he just texted back, I said, what's your theory on this?

And he just wrote back, did you see Theo Von's tweet? That's all he wrote back for some reason. I wanted more from him. But I did see Theo Von's tweet and we'll put it up here. Theo Von, a popular podcaster who hosted JD Vance prior to the election, in which JD Vance was calling for the release of the Epstein files on the show. Theo Von was just not impressed. He's like, why don't you just bring the mass icon petition up for a vote? And I guess that to me signifies that both it's breaking through a little bit more in public. Obviously,

Evans-Law, Shane Gillis and the SB Awards and also that Ro Khanna is attentive and knows about Theo Von's Twitter feed and knows that the pressure is on for House Republican leadership to do these things and will continue to apply that pressure because he feels like the cultural headwinds are in his favor here. Yeah, it's so funny. I almost wonder if we've like over indexed

on the Manosphere, you know, like we're all looking at Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn and Andrew Schultz and like, you know, the way they go, thus goes America and all that stuff. In reality, you know, there are like one subculture, right? And I do want to say like, I have been wondering about this because we do have like actual public polling about this stuff now,

not if all the developments- What does it say? I actually don't know what it says. Well, so I have not like looked at an extensive array of them, but I did see one CBS poll, CBS, you go have poll over the weekend that was like, everybody hates the way that Trump is handling this, but it's very low down,

basically everybody's priority list politics, right? And that's not to say it's not important. It bounces off in all kinds of different ways. Like maybe you don't, maybe like you don't personally care about the Epstein files all that much, but like the way Trump is handling them might give you pause about how he handles other things. So like, I totally get that.

I just don't like, we've been doing Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, and I don't want to give people the impression that like, this is make or break for the Trump administration necessarily, right? I mean, like, it's, it matters. It's huge. It hugely matters. But I think we're all still figuring out how it's going to matter. And in what ways it's going to bounce and all that. 100%. And we've been doing other stuff too, but it is a delicious story. Um, all right. I was going to throw out another topic to you, but we'll save it for another time. Tease the audience with some more. And Gregor, thank you for joining me, man. Appreciate it. Always up to talk Epstein. That's why I really

like you. And we will be looking forward to tomorrow's morning shots, which will inevitably, inevitably be about Epstein. Bill will come through because Bill's back and he'll give us more episode. All right. Thank you guys for watching this. Subscribe to the feed. We appreciate that.