A protester holds a sign related to the release of the Jeffrey Epstein case files outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, Nov. 12, 2025.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
A petition in the House of Representatives to force a vote to release the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files on Wednesday secured the last signature required to trigger that action.
Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., provided the 218th signature needed to approve the petition shortly after she was sworn in as a House member, after a seven-week delay.
The Trump administration has been under fire for months for reneging on promises to release investigative files related to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who killed himself in 2019 after his arrest on child sex trafficking charges.
Epstein had been a friend of President Donald Trump for years before they had a falling out in the early 2000s.
House Democrats earlier Wednesday released more than 20,000 documents obtained from Epstein’s estate under a subpoena.
The documents include emails and text messages in which Epstein talked about Trump.
“I know how dirty donald is,” Epsten wrote in a 2018 email thread for Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as former President Barack Obama’s White House counsel, after she sent Epstein an article about Trump’s ex-personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s pleading guilty to campaign finance violations and agreeing to cooperate in a federal investigation of the president.
In a separate April 2019 email released by Democrats, Epstein told author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls.” It is unclear what the phrase “knew about the girls” meant.
CNBC has not independently verified the documents released by the Democrats.
Trump has denied having known about Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls and young women when they were socializing with each other. The president has never been charged with wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
Trump blasted the Democrats in a Truth Social post that accused them of using the Epstein documents to distract Americans from the cost of the U.S. government shutdown.
“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” Trump wrote.
“Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap,” he wrote.
” The Democrats cost our Country $1.5 Trillion Dollars with their recent antics of viciously closing our Country, while at the same time putting many at risk — and they should pay a fair price,” Trump said.
“There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”
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