| It’s been several months since the Justice Department announced it had nothing more to share publicly about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. President Donald Trump says he’d rather move on, but it’s not a story that’s fading into the background. Far from it: “This is not a hoax,” one of Epstein’s accusers said Wednesday in a news conference outside the Capitol, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers demanded to know who associated with Epstein. Epstein was a wealthy, well-connected socialite who died in jail in 2019 before he could be tried on sex trafficking charges. His death meant that details about his relationships with presidents, princes and Wall Street barons were never shared in court. Now Congress may be the key to making public the years-old investigation files that have animated conservatives, conspiracy theorists and — lately — much of the country. A CBS News-YouGov poll conducted in July found that 58 percent of Americans say they’re following news about the case closely. “There is a sense Epstein had so much influence over these elites,” said Cynthia Wang, who studies conspiracy theories and heads a conflict-management center at Northwestern University. Here’s what’s going on. The House may vote soon to demand all files on Epstein It would be a remarkable rebuke of Trump, whose White House has told reporters that voting to release the files is a “very hostile act to the administration.” A bipartisan group of lawmakers could force a vote soon anyway. They’re trying to get a majority in the House — mostly Democrats along with a handful of Republicans — to sign a petition that would force a floor vote on releasing all the Epstein files. This procedural tool has previously been threatened on issues ranging from remote voting to immigration. It rarely yields legislation, but the Epstein files may have enough support to be one of the only petitions in a decade to get a House vote. “A nation that cannot hold accountable rich and powerful men who have abused young girls is a nation that has lost its moral and spiritual bearings,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California), who is pushing for this legislation, told NPR. But that’s not enough to release the files. The Republican-controlled Senate would also have to pass the House legislation, and Trump would have to sign it into law. A parallel congressional investigation released tens of thousands of pages of Epstein files A Republican-led House committee recently subpoenaed the Justice Department to hand over its Epstein files. This week, the committee shared what the Justice Department has sent so far: roughly 33,000 pages of documents, although much of it is information that was already publicly available. “I just don’t think that’s going to satisfy folks,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who is leading the effort for a full House vote for documents, told The Washington Post’s Kadia Goba. His Democratic partner, Khanna, said Wednesday that less than 1 percent of the Epstein files have been released. There are other investigations in Congress about Epstein, too. A Democratic senator, Ron Wyden (Oregon), is trying to get federal records tracking large, potentially suspicious payments among Epstein and his associates, which he says total about $1 billion. The political debate has centered on the accusers Specifically, how to protect their privacy. Trump’s allies have zeroed in on accuser privacy as a reason to not make any more information public: Attorney General Pam Bondi has said much of the files on Epstein contain child pornography and are “never going to see the light of day.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) met with victims this week and said while he supports some efforts to get documents, he doesn’t support the petition lawmakers are pushing over concerns it wouldn’t adequately protect victims: “We have to very carefully guard their identities,” he said. “We can’t be haphazard about this.” Massie and Khanna say their legislation makes sure accusers who don’t want to be identified are protected, and on Wednesday they brought victims who have shared their names and stories to the microphone; it was one of the largest gatherings of Epstein’s accusers since his 2019 death. One accuser said she and other women would compile their own “list” of abusers: “We know the names,” Lisa Phillips said. “Many of us were abused by them.” Trump backers are focused on Ghislaine Maxwell The Trump administration has characterized Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, as a source of truth in all of this. The Justice Department recently interviewed her while she’s serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. In the interview, according to transcripts released by the Justice Department, she said she never saw Trump engage in inappropriate conduct with Epstein. Trump and Epstein were friends for decades before a falling out in the early 2000s. There has been no public release of evidence of any wrongdoing on Trump’s part. There are political risks to relying on Maxwell’s testimony. The government said Maxwell lied repeatedly under oath leading up to her trial. Now that she’s in prison, legal experts say she has an obvious interest in telling the government what it wants to hear. Amid all this, she was recently moved to a minimum-security prison camp. Epstein accusers have heavily criticized the government’s reliance on Maxwell. “It was you who sent me off to the home of a monster, knowing what was waiting for me,” Teresa Helm said Wednesday of Maxwell. The Trump administration also asked three judges to release grand jury information related to the cases of Epstein and Maxwell, but all three judges have denied the request — because grand jury information is typically kept secret and victims’ names could be shared. Legal experts say there’s not much this could shed light on anyway. One judge noted that the government has much more about Epstein in its hands than any grand jury information. The Republican-controlled Congress could spend significant time in the coming weeks trying to make those documents public. | 
