Triumph

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House quietly pressured senators to delay a vote to force the release of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, even as President Donald Trump publicly insisted his administration had nothing to hide and urged Congress to act, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

The effort failed Tuesday when senators approved the measure passed by the Republican-controlled House without the changes Trump’s advisers had pushed for, exposing the limits of the president’s influence over his party on an issue that has plagued him since he returned to power this year. Trump announced in a social media post on Wednesday that he had signed the measure. His signature capped an extraordinary week that began when Trump changed course Sunday night to urge the House to pass a bill his administration had been trying to stall or stop for months. The move forces the release of U.S. Justice Department files on Epstein, the late convicted sex offender and New York financier who fraternized with some of the country’s most influential men.

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PIVOT TOWARDS DAMAGE CONTROL

By late Sunday afternoon, top White House aides and the president had wrapped up their campaign to prevent the vote from failing, and sought to shift from prevention to damage control, said the sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

White House aides stepped up their outreach to Senate leaders to request amendments to the House bill, including language to protect victims, in a final effort to influence the measure, the two sources said.

They prepared for a period of “messaging and management” to delay the bill, encouraging senators to present any delays as responsible oversight. Talking points tailored to vulnerable Republicans also circulated, urging them to frame the vote around transparency while quickly steering the conversation toward affordability issues that are expected to loom large in next year’s midterm congressional elections.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Trump was concerned that focusing on Epstein would distract from his other priorities.

“President Trump has never been against the release of the Epstein files; rather, he has always been against Republicans falling into the Democratic trap of talking about this instead of focusing on the historic tax cuts signed into law, the fact that zero illegal aliens have entered our country in five months, and the many other accomplishments of the Trump Administration on behalf of the American people,” Jackson said.

LIMIT TO TRUMP’S POWER?

Despite weeks of strategizing and direct pressure on lawmakers, including a long delay in the swearing-in of a newly elected Democratic lawmaker, congressional Republicans moved forward against Trump’s wishes.

The fight has taken a toll on Trump’s public approval, which fell to its lowest point this year in a Reuters/Ipsos poll concluded on Monday. It found that only 44% of Republicans thought Trump was handling the Epstein situation well.

Another 60% of Americans believed the federal government was hiding information about Epstein’s death, and 70% believed it was hiding information about people involved in his sex crimes. Most Trump Republicans shared those suspicions.

The saga also soured relations with one of his strongest Republican supporters in Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

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Trump socialized and partied with Epstein in the 1990s and 2000s before what he calls a breakup, and later amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein among his own followers. Now, many Trump voters believe his administration has covered up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscured details about his death in a Manhattan jail, which was ruled a suicide while Trump was president in 2019.

Epstein pleaded guilty to felony prostitution in the state of Florida in 2008 and served 13 months in prison. The US Department of Justice charged him with sex trafficking of minors in 2019. Epstein had pleaded not guilty to those charges before his death.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and investigative material to date has yet to reveal any specific compromising details, although House Democrats last week released a 2019 email from Epstein that cryptically maintained that Trump “knew about the girls.”

The intense attention placed on Epstein’s files has fueled frustration within the White House and for Trump personally. This week, the president lashed out at female reporters who pressed him about Epstein, calling one “a terrible person” and saying, “calm down, calm little pig” to another. Aides expressed exasperation at what they see as the GOP’s fixation on the issue; They fear that it will persist no matter what files are published.

“There is a misconception, accepted by many in the Republican Party, that the federal government is hiding information about Epstein,” a senior White House official said. “But that theory is simply not true…the president has nothing to hide.”

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal; writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Scott Malone, Colleen Jenkins, Stephen Coates, Rod Nickel)