GOP Shuts Down House Early To Avoid Epstein Vote — Trump Frantically Tries To Change the Subject to Obama

If Trump and the GOP want to people to believe they're not hiding anything, they're doing everything they can to make people — including their supporters — think the opposite.

House Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have found a convenient escape route as the Jeffrey Epstein fiasco continues to flare. In a move that sidesteps an impending vote on whether to release documents related to Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls, Johnson is sending lawmakers home early, cutting short the congressional calendar by a day and kicking off a five-week recess. The House won’t be back until September.

The GOP House Speaker had previously dismissed calls to release the Epstein files as mere “political games” orchestrated by Democrats. “We’re not going to allow them to engage in that charade anymore,” he declared, accusing them of wielding Epstein’s case like a “political battering ram.”

But the push for transparency isn’t coming solely from the left. Several GOP lawmakers, including prominent voices from Trump’s MAGA bloc, are also demanding that the so-called Epstein files be made public. “The public’s not going to let this die, and rightfully so,” said Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina.

Trump himself once suggested he’d unseal the files during his presidential campaign. But a recently released memo from the Department of Justice and FBI asserts there’s no “credible evidence” that Epstein blackmailed powerful people, and insists that a “client list” simply does not exist.

That finding hasn’t exactly landed well among Trump’s base. Some MAGA loyalists have already turned their ire toward Trump’s own appointees, calling for the firing of attorney general Pam Bondi and casting doubt on the futures of FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino.

Tensions spiked further when The Wall Street Journal revealed a bombshell report on a 2003 birthday message Trump allegedly sent Epstein, which referenced “secrets” and included a crude drawing. Trump says he’s suing both the paper and Rupert Murdoch, calling the story “false, malicious, and defamatory.”

Meanwhile, in a development that could inflame the debacle in a major way, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said Tuesday that he’s reached out to Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team and plans to meet with her “soon.” Maxwell, now serving a 20-year sentence, was convicted for her role in recruiting underage girls for Epstein’s abuse.

“If Ghislaine Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say,” Blanche stated.

Also on Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell for details regarding Epstein’s operations. The Justice Department, for its part, has filed a motion to release grand jury transcripts from the cases against both Epstein and Maxwell—just days after Trump publicly called on the DoJ to release “credible” evidence.

Despite having once promised full disclosure, Trump now seems eager to distance himself from the mess. When asked about Blanche’s decision to meet with Maxwell, Trump claimed ignorance: “I didn’t know that they were going to do it. I don’t really follow that too much . . . It’s a witch-hunt, just a continuation of a witch-hunt.”

Trump deflects questions about Epstein and changes the subject to Obama

Trump tried to yank the spotlight away from the deepening controversy over the sealed Epstein documents on Tuesday by lobbing fresh accusations of treason at his predecessors and calling on his Justice Department to go on the offensive.

“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump declared before accusing former President Barack Obama of “treason.”

Sitting beside Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the Oval Office, Trump brushed off the uproar surrounding Epstein, downplaying the whole thing as “a witch hunt,” adding that he “didn’t know” the DOJ was planning to re-interview Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

“I don’t follow it too much,” Trump said, instead steering attention toward what he labeled “the other witch hunt” — his long-running (and still unproven) theory that Obama orchestrated a plot to falsely accuse him of collusion with Russia.

With Republicans split over Trump’s failure to follow through on promises to release Epstein-related documents, the president’s comments marked a clear pivot — not only to deflect scrutiny, but to revive an old favorite tactic: demanding legal action against political enemies.

“This was treason,” Trump insisted. “Barack Hussein Obama is the ringleader. Hillary Clinton was right there with him and so was Sleepy Joe Biden, and so were the rest of them: [former FBI Director James] Comey, [former Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper, the whole group. They tried to rig an election and they got caught. And then they did rig the election in 2020. And then because I knew I won that election by a lot, I did it a third time and I won in a landslide.”

Trump cited a set of newly declassified documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard last week. According to Gabbard, Obama and senior aides “manufactured and politicized intelligence” surrounding Russian interference efforts in 2016.

“This is like proof, irrefutable proof, that Obama was sedatious, that Obama was trying to lead a coup,” Trump said, apparently substituting “sedatious” for “seditious.” “This is the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

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As for whether any actual legal action will follow, Trump said that decision lies with Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom he praised as “a very competent, very good, very loyal to our country person.”

Gabbard’s findings come under scrutiny, with critics saying she’s trying to rewrite the script to punish Trump’s political enemies and distract from Epstein

Gabbard, teaming up with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, has been touting declassified emails as supposed proof that Obama-era officials skewed intelligence in an orchestrated attempt to delegitimize Trump’s 2016 victory.

That storyline, however, continues to clash with a mountain of evidence to the contrary. A bipartisan Senate probe concluded back in 2020 after exhaustive investigation that Russia interfered in the election with the goal of damaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The CIA recently reaffirmed that conclusion.

Meanwhile, special counsel John Durham’s much-hyped, three-year inquiry failed to produce any criminal charges against CIA personnel and found no evidence of a conspiracy among Obama officials to sabotage Trump’s presidency.

Yet on Monday, Gabbard’s office had submitted a criminal referral to the Justice Department regarding the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian election interference, though notably, it offered no clarity on what laws were allegedly broken.

Critics on Capitol Hill, particularly among Democrats, accused Gabbard and the administration of manufacturing a political distraction amid mounting fury over the Epstein case.

“This is just another example of the DNI trying to cook the books, rewrite history, and erode trust in the intelligence agencies she’s supposed to be leading,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Undeterred, Gabbard doubled down on Friday, claiming that newly declassified emails revealed a “treasonous conspiracy” by Obama-era figures to amplify the Russian threat and weaken Trump’s presidency from the outset.

“Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people,” Gabbard said in a statement. She demanded that “every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”

Democratic lawmakers, however, pushed back, accusing Gabbard of muddying the waters by conflating two separate questions: whether Russia attempted to manipulate vote tallies (which no one has substantiated) and whether it sought to influence voters with propaganda and stolen Democratic emails (which multiple investigations have confirmed).

The Obama administration, for the record, never claimed that Russian cyber activity altered vote counts.

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Gabbard’s claims “baseless” and a tired attempt to revive long-debunked conspiracy theories.

Gabbard is “rehashing decade-old false claims about the Obama Administration,” Himes said Friday. “Few episodes in our nation’s history have been investigated as thoroughly as the Intelligence Community’s warning in 2016 that Russia was interfering in the election.”

Veteran intelligence official Larry Pfeiffer, who advised presidents from both parties across a 30-year career, was equally blunt in his assessment, calling Gabbard’s conclusions “grossly flawed and inconsistent with the findings of years-long investigations by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Senate.”

He also warned that Gabbard’s openly partisan conduct in a supposedly nonpartisan role risked eroding trust among the intelligence community’s rank and file.