The House of Representatives, in a bipartisan vote, passed a bill to compel the Department of Justice to release additional information about the federal government’s investigations into the late disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The bill passed on a 427-1 vote.
Riley Moore and Carol Miller, West Virginia’s congressional representatives, voted in favor of the bill.
“Today, House Republicans took an important step to provide the American people the radical transparency they deserve regarding Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s horrific crimes. I voted to release the files today,” said Moore, a Republican.
“This bill continues the Trump Administration’s efforts to provide as much information to the public as possible. The Justice Department has already turned over more than 62,000 documents to the House Oversight Committee, and this bill requires the Justice Department to release all remaining documents to the public.”
Miller, also a Republican, posted a statement about her vote on the Epstein files on social media.
“The American people deserve transparency, and victims of his heinous abuse deserve justice,” Miller posted.
“I trust our Department of Justice and the House Oversight Committee to handle this investigation with care to prevent any further pain to the victims and their families.
The information that could be released includes materials related to Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, flight logs and travel records and names of individuals referenced in connection with the investigation — with protections for victims’ identifiable information and ongoing investigations.
A small bipartisan group of House lawmakers led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) and Ro Khanna (D-California) introduced a discharge petition in July to maneuver around House Speaker Mike Johnson’s control of which bills make it to the House floor.
The effort gained momentum in recent days as the federal shutdown ended, Johnson swore in Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva and, then, Grijalva immediately signed a discharge petition, becoming the final signature needed to force a vote.
This week, after consistently pushing back on the release of the casefiles, President Trump changed course and called on House Republicans to support their release. Trump has said he will sign the bill.
West Virginia Democrats leveled criticism at Moore and Miller for agreeing to support the resolution today without earlier supporting the discharge petition.
“Let’s be absolutely clear,” West Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Mike Pushkin said. “Riley Moore and Carol Miller had one job — sign the discharge petition and help force the release of the Epstein files. They refused.
“They stood with Trump to stop that release until the very last second, and only switched their votes when Trump caved because he knew he was going to lose. That’s not leadership. That’s complicity.”
The bill now goes to the U.S. Senate for consideration.
“I would vote to release the files,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, said on MetroNews Midday.
Epstein trafficked underage girls and cultivated a social circle of public figures that included politicians and celebrities. He was charged with running a network of underage girls for sex and died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial
Two criminal investigations amassed documents including transcripts of interviews with victims and witnesses and items confiscated from raids of his various properties.
Epstein is believed to have abused and trafficked dozens, and potentially hundreds, of underage girls and young women over decades. Some were as young as 14.
Epstein’s survivors participated in a press conference outside the Capitol on the day of the U.S. House vote, urging lawmakers to pass the bill and “stop making this political.”
“I think this is such a distraction to what we really need to be talking about here, which is, you know, the price of groceries and how we work to help our farmers and things of this nature, and protect the country and fight crime and all these other things. And yet we’re talking about the Epstein files,” Capito said.
“So let’s get it over with. Let’s just rip the band aid off and go forward.”
A few hours after the House passed the measure to release the Epstein files, the Senate unanimously voted to send it to President Trump to sign.