House Speaker Mike Johnson slammed Democratic lawmakers who are using the Epstein files against President Donald Trump.
Johnson’s remarks came during a Tuesday press conference in which he discussed a discharge petition that Congress approved that would compel the Justice Department to release the totality of the files related to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
President Trump on Monday reversed his stance against releasing the files and supported the vote in favor of the petition.
Johnson pointed out the blatant hypocrisy on the part of Democrats who have become quite vocal in their criticisms of the Trump administration over the handling of the Epstein files. He noted that “the biggest proponents of this discharge petition were nevere actually interested in transparency or ensuring justice or protecting victims of this unspeakable tragedy, the Epstein evils.”
Because the Democrats had every one of the Epstein files in their possession for the four long years of the Biden administration. The Biden Department of Justice had the files the entire time, and not a single one of the people who are so loud and animated right now, they never said anything about it. For all those four years, none of them held press conferences, none of them demanded the release of the documents. And under Biden's DOJ…When they prosecuted just Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, not a single one of these Democrats or any of the proponents of the discharge ever made any noise about that at all.
Johnson pointed out that the Justice Department had the files under the Biden administration, but did not release them. “Why suddenly are they so interested they have such an urgent interest in the Jeffrey Epstein matter?”
Of course, the speaker’s question has a simple answer. “Democrats are trying to use the Epstein matter as a political weapon to distract from their own party’s failures,” he said. “And in a desperate attempt, they’re trying to somehow tie President Trump to…the scandal.”
Johnson also criticized the discharge petition, saying it “doesn’t have adequate protections” for Epstein’s victims and “risks re-victimizing those who were trafficked and exploited.”
He further argued that “releasing information containing the names of innocent people would subject those innocent people to a guilt by association” and “would create an entirely new group of victims who have no means to clear their names.”
The speaker insisted that Republican lawmakers want full transparency about the Epstein issue, but they want to ensure that victims and innocent parties are protected. “Republicans are ready and eager to continue our work to clean up the mess that the Democrats made. We’ve been doing that already and we’re going to continue to do it,” he said.
Of course, Johnson is right, as many have pointed out. None of the Democratic lawmakers railing about the release of the Epstein files were willing to speak up when former President Joe Biden was in office.
They don’t care about the victims. They don’t care about the evil deeds Epstein did. They care only for power. For them, sex trafficking is not a problem that needs to be stopped; it is a political weapon to be used against their political opponents.
It’s reasonable to call for transparency. But we can also recognize that many of those making these calls are not heroes — they are power-hungry creeps exploiting sex trafficking victims to score cheap political points.
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