A Democrat easily won a special election for an open House seat in Arizona, giving a bipartisan group of representatives the numbers needed to force a vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Adelita Grijalva, who was running to succeed her late father, Rep. Raul Grijalva, has vowed to sign a House resolution to force a vote on legislation instructing the Department of Justice to release all of its investigative files on the late sex offender.
Her victory cuts the Republican House majority to 219-214, and means she can deliver a decisive signature on the petition, which needs 218 votes to pass, CNN reported.
Its co-sponsor, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), told the outlet that a vote on his Epstein Files Transparency Act could be coming as soon as mid-October.
The Associated Press called the race for Arizona’s 7th district early Wednesday for Grijalva, who was leading her Republican opponent with 68.5 percent of the vote.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to call a vote on the legislation, which President Donald Trump opposes, and even released the House a day early for its August recess to avoid any votes on the files.
In response, Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna introduced a discharge petition earlier this month that would circumvent party leaders to bring the bill to the floor.
Every House Democrat has signed, along with a handful of Republican defectors. The White House has warned lawmakers that Trump views pushing for the files’ release as a “very hostile act.”
For more than a decade, Trump was good friends with Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Although officials concluded the disgraced financier died by suicide, several MAGA factions have argued that he was murdered in his cell to protect his powerful clients.
Despite promising to release the files during his re-election bid, the president has since dismissed the effort as a Democrat-led “hoax” designed to distract from what he argues are “the most successful eight months of any president ever.”
Last week, Massie told CNN that the House could vote on his Epstein bill as soon as mid-October. Once Grijalva is sworn in and the needed signatures are secured, Massie must wait at least seven legislative days to bring the bill to the floor.
House leaders can also wait two legislative days before putting it to a vote. The bill is likely to face an uphill battle in the Senate if it clears the House, but it will force Republicans to go on record over the Epstein files.
It’s not a matter of if the actual truth comes out, but when. At least that’s what I reckon.
There are just way too many people caught up in the web – and orders of magnitude more who have a non-zero investment in the outcome, emotionally or otherwise – for it to quietly fade away like they’re wanting it to.
This is like, the last reliably bipartisan thing we have left if you don’t count eating, sleeping and shitting. I would say it’s even beyond that - pretty much everyone who’s not a pedo (which I would hope is, like, at the very minimum 99%) wants the same thing – for the truth to come out, and for comprehensive justice to be served.
I’m not going to make it part of my personality and larp as an activist, filling the Internet with low-effort spam, or claiming that everything else that ever happens is “a distraction” from this, no.
The dam will break, the ticking thingy eventually explodes, and I can be very patient. I just hope we still have a functioning justice system when it does.