Epstein accusers ramp up pressure on Congress: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, a newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, our Capitol Hill team reports on how the Jeffrey Epstein saga that’s splitting Republicans is not dying down in Washington. Plus, Andrea Mitchell puts Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent health policy moves in context ahead of his Senate hearing tomorrow.

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— Adam Wollner

Epstein accusers ramp up pressure on Congress

By Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Kyle Stewart and Erik Ortiz

A group of Jeffrey Epstein accusers told emotional, gut-wrenching stories of sexual abuse at the hands of the late convicted sex offender and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, raising pressure on lawmakers to back the release of all of the files in the Justice Department’s yearslong investigation.

The news conference was organized by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who are pushing to collect 218 signatures — half of the members of the House — to force a vote to compel the DOJ to release its Epstein files.

The accusers said that if Congress isn’t willing to support the release of the documents, they would compile their own list of names to hold those in Epstein’s orbit accountable. “Together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know, who were regularly in the Epstein world,” said Lisa Phillips, who said she was brought to Epstein’s island.

As of this morning, 130 Democrats and four Republicans — Massie and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina — had signed onto the discharge petition.

GOP split: But President Donald Trump’s White House and Republican congressional leaders are opposed to the release of all of the files, saying that doing so could inadvertently expose the identities of victims who don’t want to go public.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has blasted the discharge push as misguided because the House Oversight Committee is already investigating the Epstein matter. Last night, the GOP-led panel released what it described as the first batch of documents from the Justice Department — more than 33,000 pages of records. But much of it had already been made public through court filings and other releases.

And this afternoon, the House passed a measure from leadership that directs the Oversight Committee to continue its Epstein investigation, offering an alternative to the discharge petition for Republicans wanting to get themselves on the record on the issue.

Meanwhile, the White House framed voting for the discharge petition as a “hostile act” toward the Trump administration.

“Helping Thomas Massie and liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee, would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration,” a White House official said.

Read more →

RFK Jr.’s agenda is part of a broader Trump 2.0 pattern

Analysis by Andrea Mitchell

Firings and resignations in protest at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The cancellation of half a billion dollars in contracts for mRNA vaccine research. New Covid vaccine guidelines excluding children and pregnant women, mostly limiting distribution to those over 65 or with other health conditions.

All this has led to fears of the re-emergence of preventable diseases, like this year’s outbreak of measles. It has alarmed more than 1,000 current and former Health Department employees now calling for the resignation of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. California, Oregon and Washington state are so concerned by what they call “the Trump administration’s destruction of the U.S. CDC’s credibility and scientific integrity,” they will issue their own vaccine guidelines. Meanwhile, in Florida, the state surgeon general is getting rid of school vaccine mandates altogether, likening them to “slavery.”

Nine former CDC directors offered a forceful rebuke of Kennedy in a New York Times essay headlined “Kennedy is Endangering Every American’s Health.” He rebutted with column in The Wall Street Journal: “We’re Restoring Public Trust in the CDC.”

Kennedy, due to face Senate questioning Thursday at a previously scheduled hearing, has unique power in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. Having briefly run for president in 2024 before throwing his weight behind Trump, he still commands his own political following of vaccine critics. That has created a dilemma for the president, The Wall Street Journal reported, acknowledging to supporters recently that he can’t publicly boast about one of the proudest achievements of his first term: ordering Operation Warp Speed to develop the Covid vaccine in record time.

More concerning to many is that RFK Jr.’s controversial health policies are only part of a larger rejection of long-established scientific principles in Trump’s second term. The Environmental Protection Agency has abandoned the decades-long accepted notion that human activity contributes to climate change, a fundamental connection underlying a host of environmental laws and regulations. Global scientists have denounced a recent administration report rejecting the conclusion that burning fossil fuels causes the planet to overheat, and calling the threat of climate change overblown.

University researchers say some of the administration’s decisions opposing innovation and scientific progress are irreversible, such as the cancellation of thousands of NIH biomedical research projects. Once interrupted, they can never be completed. Another radical change: the elimination of the State Department’s entire climate bureau, ceding leadership to China and the European Union on global negotiations. Plus, there are the wholesale firings at the EPA and the silencing of agency whistleblowers.

Critics call it a war on facts that will set back the U.S., long the world’s leader in scientific discovery. It is causing an exodus of scientists to Europe and China, only too happy to benefit from America’s loss.

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner and Bridget Bowman.

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