Both houses of Congress voted to release the documents on Tuesday (local time).
The Department of Justice (DoJ) has 30 days to make the unclassified Epstein files publicly available.
Background
Jeffrey Epstein was a wealthy financier who was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges.
He was known to be friends with an array of high-profile politicians, celebrities, and the wealthy.
In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
In 2019, Trump said he hadn’t spoken to Epstein in 15 years.
Epstein files
The ‘Epstein files’ are a series of documents relating to Epstein’s sex trafficking charges. During Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, he promised to release the documents.
The DoJ and the U.S. House Oversight Committee both released batches of documents relating to Epstein earlier this year, which Democrats have said were largely already public.
An FBI memorandum shared in July stated there was “no basis” to share more files and “no incriminating client list.”
New documents
Last week, Democrat members of the Oversight Committee shared a series of Epstein’s email conversations.
In a 2019 email to author Michael Wolff, Epstein said “of course he knew about the girls,” referring to Trump.
After publishing the emails, Republican committee members shared a Google Drive folder containing more than 20,000 documents “from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein”.
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The sharing of these documents comes amid renewed calls to release all of the ‘Epstein files’.
Vote
In July, Republican representative Thomas Massie created a “discharge petition” that would see the introduction of a bill to the lower house to release the Epstein files.
Massie secured enough signatures on the petition last week, despite pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump on Republicans who signed it.
In the following days, Republican members of the upper house – the Senate – suggested they would also support the bill.
The bill passed the lower house 427 votes to one on Tuesday (local time), with the Senate voting unanimously to send it to the President’s desk hours later.
Despite his previous objections, Trump signed the bill into law on Wednesday (local time).
Response
Before the vote, alleged Epstein victim-survivor Annie Farmer told international media on Tuesday (local time) that concealing the files was “institutional betrayal,” and that “because these crimes were not properly investigated, so many more girls and women were harmed”.
Republican Clay Higgins was the only lower house representative to vote against the bill. He wrote on X the bill will reveal “criminal investigative files... to a rabid media, [and] will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.”
What's next?
Trump signed the bill into law on Wednesday (local time).
This means the DoJ has 30 days to publish every unclassified document related to Epstein.
The law states: “No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity”.
However, it allows the Attorney-General to withhold or redact any documents containing or depicting child sexual abuse or victims’ personal information, or could “jeopardize” an investigation.
