WASHINGTON – The U.S. House returned from its 60-day recess this week and so did the Epstein scandal.
A congressional committee released more than 20,000 pages of emails from the estate of the financier who was accused of sex trafficking minors and who died in jail awaiting trial.
The emails showed that, until his arrest in 2019, Epstein insulted President Donald Trump repeatedly and hinted he had threatening information about him. Epstein said he knew Trump intimately and was “the one able to take him down.”
Epstein, who mingled with the rich and powerful, had a longstanding friendship with Trump. But Trump said he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago because of a dispute over a real estate deal and because Epstein was poaching employees of his private club.
However, the emails released this week show that a relationship continued and was much closer than Trump has described. In one email, Epstein wrote that Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of the victims. In another, Epstein said Trump “knew about the girls.”
In another email Epstein sent in 2015, he asked Landon Thomas, a New York Times journalist, if Thomas “would … like [photos] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen.”
Members of Congress also refocused on Epstein because a new member of Congress, Adelita Grijalva, who was elected in September, was finally sworn in as the Democratic representative of an Arizona district on Wednesday.
Grijalva provided the last signature needed on a discharge petition that would force a vote on legislation requiring the Justice Department to turn over all its information on Epstein. The petition needed the support of at least 218 members, which is a majority in the House.
The discharge petition requires House Speaker Mike Johnson, who opposed the legislation, to put the Epstein bill up for a vote. Johnson said he’d do that next week.
The bill is likely to pass the House because a small stampede of Republican members are expected to support it since rejecting the legislation would spark ire among many MAGA voters.
Those voters are convinced there has been a coverup to protect the rich and powerful who associated with Epstein and attended parties on his private island and his six properties that featured underaged girls.
According to Politico, Rep. Tom Emmer, R-6th District, whose leadership job is to secure votes for Johnson, said he would not whip the Epstein bill.
Nonetheless, Emmer and Minnesota’s other Republicans are likely to vote against the legislation, which has infuriated Trump.
On Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump accused Democrats of “trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” and warned GOP lawmakers that “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap.”
The vote on the Epstein legislation would be largely symbolic. The legislation faces an uphill climb in the U.S. Senate, and Trump is unlikely to sign it into law. Still, it would force many GOP lawmakers to defy the president, most of them for the first time.
Shutdown bill allows senators to sue over J6 probe
The “deal” Congress approved this week that ended the 43-day federal government shutdown was hastily drafted and lawmakers were largely unaware of some of its provisions.
Crafted in the U.S. Senate, the legislation would fund several agencies — including the Agriculture Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration and the legislative branch of government — for a full year and the rest of the federal government until the end of January.
One provision tucked into the bill has raised plenty of eyebrows this week. It would give senators the opportunity to sue the Justice Department for $500,000 per incident, and reimbursement of legal fees, if their phone data was sought or obtained during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
House members whose phone records were obtained would not be eligible.
Smith sought the phone records of eight GOP senators as well as one member of the House during his probe.
While Republican House members have decried the investigation into lawmaker phone records as illegal and abusive overreach, the provision in the shutdown bill set off a furious backlash in the House.
But that GOP anger in the House did not stop the chamber from passing the bill Wednesday night. All Minnesota Democrats voted against the bill and all Minnesota Republicans voted for it.
While House Republicans were furious, they did not strip the provision out of the shutdown bill because changing the legislation would have forced the Senate to pass it again, delaying the end of the shutdown.
The provision appeared to be a response to the disclosure last month that the FBI seized the phone records of nine Republicans. They were Sens. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
A salty problem
A less noticed provision in the shutdown bill quietly ends efforts by the FDA to set new voluntary sodium standards in the nation’s food supply.
The FDA was trying to get Americans to eat less salt gradually, so the decrease would not be noticed. It finalized initial voluntary sodium reduction standards in 2021 and was ready to update its guidance, setting a new standard that advocated even less sodium in foods.
But the bill said the FDA was barred from spending any money “to develop, issue, promote, or advance any final guidelines or new regulations applicable to food manufacturers for long-term population-wide sodium reduction.”
The nation’s food industry has reacted to the FDA’s voluntary guidelines in different ways.
General Mills and Hormel say they have responded to the FDA’s voluntary sodium reduction goals by reformulating many of their products to lower the sodium content.
In other news:
▪️Though the government shutdown is over, we wrote about Trump administration threats to sanction Minnesota and other states that released full SNAP benefits amid legal wrangling during the impasse.
▪️Speaking of the shutdown, we talked with people in the burgeoning hemp industry who were blindsided by a provision in the bill that reopened the government that would outlaw hemp-produced THC products.
▪️At the state level, Matt Blake profiled state Rep. Erin Koegel, who is stepping down after nearly a decade in the House, in part because of what she considers to be extreme partisanship and secrecy in the Legislature.
▪️Meanwhile, Brian Arola wrote a piece about the growth of electric vehicle maintenance programs at Minnesota colleges. While the Trump administration has put an end to federal tax credits for EV purchases, school officials say sales trends show the industry needs EV technicians.
▪️Brian also visited a World War II aircraft museum in Granite Falls, where a Veterans Day celebration included 101-year-old Bob Brix, a Clara City resident who served as a medic during the Battle of Iwo Jima.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them my way. I’ll try my best to respond. Please contact me at aradelat@minnpost.com.
The post D.C. Memo: Congress returns – and so does the Epstein saga appeared first on MinnPost.
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