Open Threads

Since No One Else Seems to Care, Let’s Remember Epstein’s Survivors www.jezebel.com/since-no-one…
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— Gingerbird🦉 (@gingerbird.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 5:49 AM

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From Puck, “Johnson Loses the Epstein Caucus”:

When a House Oversight subcommittee voted to subpoena the Justice Department to release the so-called Epstein files last week, Georgia Rep. Brian Jack made a surprising decision. The freshman congressman and Trump loyalist, who served as the president’s political director during his first term and remains close with him and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, was one of three Republicans to vote with Democrats. House Republicans generally rely on Jack for insight into the president’s thinking, and he’s been given plum assignments, including candidate recruitment for House Republicans and a seat on the powerful Steering and Rules committees. And yet here he was openly defying Trump in support of a Democratic amendment that would force the D.O.J.’s hand and metastasize a fomenting political scandal.

But Jack was in political survivor mode. Two weeks ago, as one of the members of the House Rules Committee, he and other Republicans had voted against Epstein-related amendments pushed by Democrats, causing a backlash online and from voters and eventually halting business in the House, as I reported last week. The voters in Jack’s conservative district—the same ones who propelled him to victory in a Republican primary runoff, and then a 33-point drubbing of his Democratic opponent—were demanding transparency on the Epstein issue. By Wednesday, according to a lawmaker who spoke to him, Jack had decided he had no choice but to back the subpoena before he headed home for recess to face his constituents…

As the meeting got underway, a frustrated Rep. Clay Higgins, chair of the subcommittee, told Johnson in a testy phone call, according to two people familiar with the situation, that his committee wouldn’t be able to beat back Epstein-related measures, putting members in the difficult position of having to choose between Trump and a demanding MAGA base. Higgins questioned why the committee was even gaveling in. Loudly echoing rank-and-file Republican members, he demanded to hear the speaker’s plan to address the wave of Epstein measures. Johnson didn’t have much of a strategy.

Two other Republicans joined Jack in voting for the subpoena: South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace and Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, a Freedom Caucus member in one of the most competitive districts in the country. When Perry was later asked about Epstein at a telephone town hall last week, he declared that he’d voted for transparency. “I have requested the files,” he said, according to NPR. “I have requested that the D.O.J.—and you can see the letter publicly—that the D.O.J. release the files. Not only that, they also provide a special prosecutor.”

Rep. Andy Biggs, another Freedom Caucus member, had seemed as though he was going to back the Justice Department subpoena but waited until after the other committee members had voted, and then voted against it. One Republican insisted that Biggs will lose his bid for governor in Arizona over that vote. I’m not sure that’s true, but it shows how paranoid Republicans have become about the Epstein issue. Others think Biggs probably voted against the measure because he’s seeking Trump’s endorsement for his gubernatorial race.

In any case, it appears that Johnson’s balmy six-month honeymoon with this Congress, thanks largely to Trump’s support, is over. He’s struggling to control his conference and lacks a coherent strategy to turn the page. Of course, it doesn’t help that Trump and the White House are also floundering. As it turns out, if you build a presidential campaign around “exposing the truth,” you get penalized when you look like you’re covering it up instead…

someone from the white house got on the phone with comer and told him that he should not under any circumstances be allowed to testify in front of congress.

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— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) August 1, 2025 at 6:47 PM

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New in PN: Why Epstein has Trump crashing out
“At this point, Trump might as well release all the files. They can’t do any more damage than he does himself whenever he opens his mouth on the subject.”
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 1, 2025 at 8:09 AM

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Josh Marshall, at TPM:

… I’ve said several times that the extremity of Trump’s reaction and the level of apparent panic it’s driving must be in some degree proportionate to whatever he’s keeping secret. But what if it’s not? One long time TPM Reader put this to me over the weekend. He basically said: think how long and hard Trump fought to keep his taxes secret. And yet when they finally came out it was pretty underwhelming. So maybe this is just Trump’s reflex? He doesn’t want anyone in his business and he just goes to war even if there’s not that much reason to do so…

It’s a worthwhile cautionary note. But I don’t think this is the same as the tax return issue. Yes, Trump fought that for years. But that almost entirely amounted to saying “no” over and over again. Yes, he fought it in court. But that’s what Trump does. He fights things in court. He’s got plenty of money for lawyers. That didn’t require any real exertion on his part and, critically, it didn’t involve doing himself much political harm other than the general suspicions that his opponents had of him from all the way back in 2015. And in any case there’s always going to be a limit in what you’re going to find in anyone’s tax returns. It’s information you’re giving to the government! You’re not going to find: bribe from Saddam Hussein; miscellaneous payments for sex to underage girls.

The key is that the reaction is just very different. Trump has sustained a lot of damage from the last few weeks. It’s spurred a major fracture in his MAGA coalition, almost unheard of criticism from core supporters in the MAGA cinematic universe. It’s not too much to say that the story has completely consumed Washington, D.C. as well as the Congress and executive branch. At least for the moment it’s stymieing his whole agenda. This is hurting him a lot and I don’t think he’d be allowing himself to sustain this level of damage if he didn’t see what’s in those files (or what he fears is in those files) as a big threat.

Of course, it’s possible he doesn’t know for certain what’s in the files but he knows what he did. He can’t take the risk of finding out. You could turn my life upside down and review all my private notebooks and I have perfect confidence you wouldn’t find any evidence I ever played Major League Baseball. I’m 100% innocent. Trump clearly doesn’t have that confidence about this.

I still can’t imagine what could be that bad or frankly what he’s worried about. I really have a hard time believing any of this is happening. But it is happening. And I’m going to stick to thinking the black hole is there because of the gravitational force I see it exerting.

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How Does the Epstein Scandal End? 

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this remains such an incredibly strange way to answer a very easy question
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— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) August 1, 2025 at 8:32 PM