Speaker Mike Johnson called on Ghislaine Maxwell to come clean and told Americans that he “hoped” she could be trusted on Sunday as he appeared for an interview and responded to the growing uproar around the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, including criticism of his own efforts in Congress to bury a vote on the topic.
Johnson appeared Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, where moderator Kristen Welker asked him point blank if the convicted sex trafficker girlfriend of Epstein, who died in prison in 2019, could be trusted to accurately testify about the crimes she and Epstein committed. Epstein was awaiting prosecution for sex trafficking underaged girls after a previous conviction on similar charges when he died in federal custody.
“Well, I mean, look; it’s a good question. I hope so,” Johnson told Welker in response. “I hope that she would want to come clean.”
“I hope she's telling the truth. She is convicted, she’s serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking. Her character is in some question....but if she wants to come clean now, that would be a great service to the country. We want to know every bit of information that she has.”
The House Oversight Committee voted this week to issue a subpoena for Maxwell after the Justice Department announced its own plans to speak with her. Agency officials did so for nine hours between Thursday and Friday, after making a statement seeming to confirm that her testimony hadn’t been aggressively sought before. Johnson touted that Oversight subpoena favorably on Sunday, casting it as evidence that GOP leadership supported efforts aimed at transparency.
The Trump administration turned speculation about Epstein’s death and the so-called “Client List” of his co-conspirators into a raging wildfire in early July. The Justice Department and FBI published a joint memo explaining that future releases from the files would not take place, and that the list of Epstein’s accomplices was not found. Epstein was rumored to have cultivated personal relationships with many powerful men and institutions while he was alive, and had public friendships at various points with Donald Trump and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
Critics of the president have alleged that a cover up is in the works regarding the Epstein files. Democrats have hammered the president for his reversal, and a pair of scoops from the Wall Street Journal have reported on the president’s connections to Epstein, to Trump’s fury. The newspaper reported the contents of a birthday message allegedly penned by Trump to Epstein as part of a 50th birthday celebration in 2003, including allusions to a shared “secret” between them. Trump firmly denied authoring the note, and sued the Journal and its reporters in response.r
A second article from the Journal days later reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi informed Trump in May that he was mentioned in the Epstein investigation multiple times, thought it was not clear in what context. The White House called that story “fake” and has repeatedly insinuated that Democrats including Joe Biden tampered with evidence while Trump was out of office.
The lead GOP co-sponsor behind a resolution that would force the Justice Department to release the entirety of its collected evidence related to Jeffrey Epstein said Sunday that his push was to help the convicted pedophile’s victims and would only grow stronger in the coming weeks.
Earlier on the same network, Rep. Thomas Massie appeared alongside the resolution’s lead Democratic co-sponsor, Rep. Ro Khanna, as the two promoted a resolution that would force Attorney General Pam Bondi to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” related to the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell investigations.
The issue has become divisive among the Trump-aligned right, especially on podcasting and new media platforms, as Donald Trump angrily insists that his supporters must move on from the investigation and has sought to distract MAGAworld with new allegations about Barack Obama and the investigation into his own 2016 run for the White House.
Massie told Welker this Sunday morning that “the release of the Epstein files is emblematic of what Trump ran for” and explained that the president’s MAGA base expected results.
“There seems to be a class of people beyond the law, beyond the judicial system...we all thought that when Trump was elected, he would be the bull in the china shop and break that all up,” said Massie.
Massie went on to say that the Trump administration had lost his trust on the issue after publicly supporting transparency around the investigation, then doing an abrupt about-face. The administration now calling on its supporters to move on from the issue and focus on hashing out issues with the 2016 “Russiagate” investigation instead of Epstein previously invited top conservative influencers to the White House to receive binders titled “Phase One” of the Epstein probe; “Phase Two” never materialized.
Top administration officials including Vice President JD Vance also spent months calling for the very releases the Justice Department now says it won’t authorize.
“People who were allegedly working on this weren’t sincere in their efforts,” Massie said. “Somebody should ask Speaker Mike Johnson, why did he recess Congress early so that he didn’t have to deal with the Epstein issue?”
“Politics is the art of the doable. There’s enough public pressure right now that we can get 218 votes and force this to a vote on the floor,” said Massie.
He also firmly rejected a DOJ memo explaining the administration’s position against further releases of information from the Epstein files, despite the very public promises of Bondi and others to do the opposite. In the memo, agency officials said that explicit imagery involving children was “intertwined” throughout the files collected by the Justice Department, as allegedly was identifying information about more than 1,000 victims of Epstein and Maxwell’s criminal acts.
Mike Johnson echoed those same concerns with Massie and Khanna’s resolution on Sunday, calling it “reckless”.
“That’s a straw man [argument],” Massie responded on Sunday, after Welker read part of the memo. “Ro [Khanna] and I carefully crafted this legislation so that the victims’ names would be redacted, and that no child pornography will be released.”
Read More
Epstein files latest: Maxwell may avoid subpoena as Trump says he hasn’t thought about pardoning her