It's Not a Scandal, It's an Indictment

And the entire Republican Party is complicit

Photo Credit: Arizona Republic / Bill Goodykoontz.

At long last, Mike Johnson had to do the one thing he’d been desperately trying to avoid—swear in Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva. This is a task Johnson has been putting off for seven weeks, for the obvious reason that Grijalva is the Trump regime’s worst nightmare. Why? Because she has pledged to provide the final signature on the discharge petition to force a vote on a bipartisan bill to release government files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. This is how Grijalva responded once she was finally sworn in.

This is unprecedented. It’s undemocratic, it’s unconstitutional, it’s illegal. Nobody, no member elect should ever be in this situation again, where 813,000 people are silenced because one person wants to play politics with their swearing in. . . . There have been entire freshmen classes that were sworn in during a shutdown, and the fact that the Senate hadn’t passed the CR has nothing to do with me. That was all to give Speaker Johnson more time in order to try to convince one of those four Republicans to take their name off or maybe perhaps waiting to see what was going to happen on Tuesday. . . . Southern Arizona deserves to have a representative that can fully represent them, and I am glad that that’s finally going to happen after 49 days of waiting.

It is an abuse of power and of Johnson’s office. The rich irony is that when Mike Johnson swore in Rep. Grijalva, he made her take an oath to uphold and defend the constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, while Johnson and his boss are two of the greatest enemies to our Republic.

Last week, Jeffrey Epstein’s estate released more than 20,000 pages of documents including emails in which Epstein claimed that Donald “spent hours at my house” with a woman later identified by officials and reporters as a sex-trafficking victim who accused Epstein of abusing and trafficking her when she was a teenager. Donald has dismissed the focus on these emails as a “Jeffrey Epstein hoax,” as his Republican allies circulate memos citing other portions of the documents they say clear him of wrongdoing.

As of this past weekend, Donald abruptly reversed course and urged House Republicans to vote to release the Epstein files. The reversal came after he realized dozens of Republicans were prepared to defy him. He wrote, “We have nothing to hide,” even as he dismissed the matter as a “Democrat [sic] Hoax.” Since the beginning, however, Donald has ordered the DOJ not to release the Epstein files, underscoring his desperation to keep the information contained therein hidden.

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Last week, Axios reported that the DOJ was pressuring House Republicans to withdraw their signatures from the proposal designed to force the release of the Epstein files. Donald is specifically leaning on Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Nancy Mace (R-SC).

Boebert was summoned to meet with FBI and DOJ officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, in the Situation Room. The Situation Room is the most secure SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) on the planet. No recording devices are allowed and participants are not allowed to reveal anything that was discussed.

We’re expected to believed that these agency heads were there to have a measured conversation with Boebert about her feelings regarding the discharge petition—not to pressure or threaten her—but there is literally no reason for her to have been summoned to the Situation Room unless the plan was to intimidate her. I’m both grateful and rather surprised that this attempt failed.

Donald had also been reaching out to Mace personally and repeatedly. Meanwhile, Mike Johnson has warned his caucus to vote against the petition. If none of the votes is reversed, the measure will “mature” for seven days, after which it can advance to the floor for debate and an eventual vote. Why the delay? Because Johnson’s job, as he sees it, is to protect Donald Trump at all costs. This vote will likely happen tomorrow.

Donald’s unexpected call to have the Epstein files released has deepened Republican infighting. He’s publicly called Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)—one of his most loyal defenders—a “traitor” and a “disgrace” which has led to credible death threats against her.

In the wake of last week’s release of Epstein’s emails, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has predicted that more than 100 Republicans may vote to release the files despite Donald’s objections. Even Speaker Mike Johnson has admitted there will likely be “lots of votes” and has moved the vote up, signaling he knows the caucus is slipping out of Donald’s—and his—control.

Last week, newly sworn-in Rep. Grijalva made the case for Congress living up to its Constitutional responsibilities:

It’s past time for Congress to restore its role as a check and balance on this administration and fight for we the American people. We need to fight for our immigrant communities and veterans. We need to stand up for our public schools, children and educators. We need to respect tribal sovereignty in our environment. We need to stand up for LGBTQ plus rights because that’s what the American people expect us to do, fight for them. That is why I will sign the discharge petition right now to release the Epstein files.

Karoline Levitt, Donald Trump, and others in the inner circle of the Trump regime would have you believe that the Democrats are using the Epstein file “hoax” as a distraction from their having capitulated to end the shutdown. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s a hoax on the one hand and say on the other that some of it’s true or that all the information that exonerates Donald is true, but anything that implicates him is false. This is not a distraction. This is about letting the American people know that some Democrats actually care about getting to the truth. They actually care about the rights that are being systematically taken away from the American people. They care about those in the LGBTQ plus community. They care about feeding our children and paying our civil servants.

They care that the president of the United States had clear ties to one of the most prolific rapists and sex traffickers of girls and young women in this county’s history.